I spent years looking for the one right way to fix my eating.
The perfect diet. The magic amount of willpower. The finish line where I could finally relax and stop thinking about food.
I’m a family physician and an obesity medicine doctor, and for a long time I could not stop eating. It drove me bananas. I knew what I “should” be doing. I counseled patients on it all day. And I still couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t stop.
Here’s what I eventually learned: most of what I believed about weight loss wasn’t true. And those beliefs weren’t just wrong — they were the exact thing making the whole thing harder.
If you’re a woman physician who struggles with overeating, stress eating, or feeling out of control around food, I want to walk you through five of these myths (plus a bonus one). You don’t have to drop them all at once. Just pick one and ask yourself: what if that wasn’t true?
Myth 1: If you’re overeating, you should start a diet
When we’re eating a lot of fast food and processed food and not feeling great about it, the go-to answer is always the same: pick a diet. Cut the junk out and start eating healthy. Right?
But a diet doesn’t solve the reason you’re overeating.
Overeating usually isn’t a food problem. It’s not actually that the fries are so delicious you can’t stop yourself. It’s that something else is driving the eating — most often stress — and your brain has learned to use food to feel better.
A diet just tells you what to eat. It never addresses why your brain reached for the food in the first place.
So you white-knuckle it for a few days, maybe a few weeks. Then a hard week hits, your brain says “we need our thing back,” and you’re right back where you started — now convinced you failed. You didn’t. The diet just never addressed the real issue.
Myth 2: If you’re not reaching your goals, you should work harder
Raise your hand if you’ve tried this one. (I’m guessing everyone.)
As physicians, working harder is the answer to almost everything. Struggling with a procedure? Do more of them. Don’t understand something? Study more. Busy day, more patients waiting? Put your head down and grind.
Eating is the one place where that backfires.
Working harder creates more stress. And more stress gives your brain more to fix with food. On top of that, anything that takes a ton of effort falls apart the second you hit a busy week — and physicians have a lot of busy weeks.
Back when I was doing emerg, OBS call, running my practice, and raising little kids, there were almost no easy weeks. No space to think about my own stuff. I’d get psyched up, ride the motivation for a bit, and then I just couldn’t keep it up. I thought that was a me problem. It wasn’t.
Real, lasting change in your eating has to feel easy. Uncomfortably easy – where you worry it feels “too easy”. Easy enough that you can do it on your worst week, not just your best one.
Myth 3: There’s a right way that will fix everything
I can’t tell you how many years I spent hunting for the “right way.” You probably have too.
Hear me when I say → There isn’t one.
There is no single “right way”.
As long as you’re searching for the one right way, you can’t see the ways that might actually work for you. And the way that works for you gets to be built around your life — the food you like, your schedule, the people you cook for, whether you even like to cook, and how your own body responds.
It helps to think of the whole thing as an experiment with an N of 1. You’re not failing a test. You’re running a trial on yourself: try something, see how it goes, keep what works, change what doesn’t.
And obstacles? They show up no matter what. Hitting one doesn’t mean you picked the wrong path. It means you’re a human being changing a behavior. For any obstacle, there are hundreds of options that might work — not one.
Myth 4: You should expect to fight yourself around food
So many of us think success means wrestling with food. You psych yourself up, you don’t eat the thing, and you count it as a win — but it took everything you had.
That’s not sustainable. And it’s exhausting to watch other people be around the same food and not seem to fight it at all.
Here’s why we think fighting is the only option: willpower and restriction are the only tools we’ve ever been handed. And they don’t last. They work for a short stretch and then set you up for a bigger crash.
What you actually want is to be around your highest trigger foods and feel… fine. Not white-knuckling. Just “yeah, I’m good right now,” and you move on.
Think about veggie sticks. Most people aren’t fighting themselves over veggie sticks, and they’re not compulsively finishing the whole tray either. They see them and think “maybe a couple” or “nah, not right now.” That calm, no-drama relationship is possible with any food. (I dug into exactly how to do that in the last episode.)
Myth 5: Just get to your goal, then you can relax
This one’s the arrival fallacy. Get to the finish line, and then you can go back to normal.
There is no finish line.
I lost a significant amount of weight about ten years ago, and I can tell you maintenance does not look all that different from losing. Maybe a little more wiggle room. Not much. It’s a way of eating and a way of handling stress that I’ve adopted for life. The times I’ve lost focus or run out of energy to care, the weight starts creeping back — because I have a body that holds weight easily.
Which means you’d better actually like what you’re doing. Not “put up with this awful diet until I can quit it.” From the very start: eat food you love. Eat food that tastes good. It’s okay if that takes time to figure out, especially if you’re used to a lot of processed food. It’s a learning curve, not a character flaw.
The bonus myth: If you were doing it right, you’d be there already
“I should be there by now. The fact that I’m not means I’m doing it wrong.”
Not true.
Everybody has their own path and their own pace. Not being there yet doesn’t mean you messed up. It usually just means there are some skills to learn or a different approach to try.
And if you’ve been running on these myths — working harder, chasing the right way, fighting the food, waiting for the finish line — the honest answer is simple: if it’s not working, it’s not working. Doing the same thing harder won’t suddenly get you somewhere new.
Where to start
Don’t try to drop all six of these at once — your brain will short-circuit. Pick one. The one you’ve believed the longest.
Then, all week, when it pops up, just ask: what if that wasn’t true?
That one question started changing everything for me.
If you want to hear me walk through all six myths in more detail, listen to this episode of the Thriving As A Physician podcast wherever you get your shows or by clicking here.
And if food has felt out of control for a long time and you’re tired of doing this alone, that’s exactly what we work on inside Thrive Academy for Overeating. Learn more here.
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