How growing up in a high-control religion shaped the beliefs that made my eating disorder feel logical.

A gentle disclaimer: this post discusses my personal experience with religion, body image, and disordered eating. My intention isn't to criticize faith, spirituality, or religion, but to reflect on how certain beliefs and experiences served to shape my relationship with food, my body, and myself.

Growing up in a high-control religion shaped the beliefs that made my eating disorder feel logical.

Oof.

Even now, that sentence feels uncomfortable to write.

I've deleted and rewritten it more times than I can count because I recognize that my experience may be different from yours.

But on the off chance my experience isn't all that different from yours (or you’re open to learning from the experiences of others), I'm going to say the uncomfortable thing anyway…

The Lessons I Learned About Being "Good"

Growing up, I learned that my body had the potential to be a problem.

I learned to be hypervigilant about how I looked, how I dressed, how I behaved, and how I was perceived by others.

I learned that self-control was a virtue.

That "good" people denied themselves things.

That there were right choices and wrong choices.

And that the consequences of making the wrong choice could be severe.

At the time, those lessons had nothing to do with food.

But they taught me something that would follow me into adulthood:

My worth was connected to my ability to follow the rules and do the ‘right’ thing.

To be disciplined.

To get it right.

To resist temptation.

To stay in control.

Why Diet Culture Felt So Familiar

Years later, when diet culture handed me a different set of rules, it felt familiar.

Good foods.

Bad foods.

Good bodies.

Bad bodies.

Eat this.

Don't eat that.

Be disciplined.

Be smaller.

Be better.

The language was different, but the underlying message wasn't.

Once again, there were clear rules to follow.

Once again, there was a right way and a wrong way.

And once again, I believed that if I could just be disciplined enough, compliant enough, and self-controlled enough, everything would finally fall into place.

Diet culture didn't have to convince me that restriction was virtuous.

I had already learned that lesson.

The Similarities Between Diet Culture and High-Control Systems

One of the things I've come to recognize is that high-control religion and diet culture rely on similar mechanisms:

Black-and-white thinking.

Moralizing behavior.

External rules over internal wisdom.

Fear of getting it wrong.

Measuring worth through compliance.

Neither teaches you how to trust yourself.

Both teach you how to monitor yourself.

And while that monitoring can feel like safety and control in the moment, it often comes at a cost.

Because the more focused you become on following rules, the less connected you become to yourself.

The Cost of Constant Self-Monitoring

Many of the women I work with aren't struggling because they don't know what healthy eating looks like.

They're struggling because they've spent years trying to outsource trust.

Trusting meal plans.

Trusting food rules.

Trusting influencers, celebrities and shitty coaches.

Trusting apps.

Trusting everyone except themselves.

And I understand that deeply because I did the same thing.

I too believed the goal was to control my body rather than to trust it.

Today, I see things differently.

I don't believe the goal is to control your body.

I think the goal is to learn how to live in your body.

Comfortably.

Confidently.

Compassionately.

To listen to it.

To care for it.

To respect it.

Not because doing so makes you more virtuous.

Not because it earns you approval or increases your value as a human being.

But because your body is the place where your life happens.

And you deserve to feel safe, happy, and at home there.

For Anyone Who Sees Themselves In This Story

If you've ever found yourself obsessing over food rules, chasing perfection, or feeling like your worth rises and falls with the scale, I want you to consider something:

What if your struggle isn't only (or perhaps at all) about food?

What if some of the beliefs driving your behavior were learned long before your first diet?

Questions to consider…

Because your relationship with food (mine too!) are shaped by so much more than simply what and how much you eat.

And if your relationship with food and body have been shaped by beliefs you’ve inherited about worthiness, obedience, and what it means to be "good”, healing your relationship with food will require examining far more than what's on your plate.