Afraid to Fail Again? Listen to This Before You Give Up.

You’re successful in every area of life… except food.

You’ve tried the diets. The plans. The rules. The white-knuckling. And now you’re tired.

Part of you wants to stop binge eating. Part of you is terrified of failing again.

In this episode of Nourished & Free, I explains why what you’ve been calling “failure” is actually the most teachable moment in the entire process, and how to make failure your secret weapon.

I'm breaking down:

• Why mistakes are necessary for learning
• How binge episodes provide powerful insight
• Why perfection isn’t the goal (and never was)
• How having support during setbacks changes everything
• What actually makes clients successful long-term

Good news, fam: You are not broken. Your brain is adaptable. Your patterns are retrainable.
And, your setbacks can become stepping stones... if you let them.

If you’re ready to stop spiraling and start recalibrating, this episode is for you.

TOPICS COVERED 👇🏼

00:00 “What if I’m just broken?” (the spiral you don’t say out loud)
02:36 The “I knew this would Happen” spiral
09:26 Why one slip turns into “I’ll start over Monday”
17:17 Learning from a binge instead of letting it define you

Transcript

Michelle Yates (00:00)
What if my brain is just broken? What if I can't overcome this?

What if other people can fix this, but not me? keep quitting everything I start. So maybe I should just accept this.

Does this sound familiar? This is a super common thought process to have if you are a smart, self-aware, and capable woman who is successful in every area of life except for food, and you've been so desperately trying to get this part of your life under control, but nothing seems to be working.

It's not that you aren't trying, you're actually trying super hard as evidenced by the many things you've done. You've spent thousands of dollars on different diets and meal plans, coaches, trainers, supplements, medications, maybe even surgeries. Yet you're still finding yourself back at square one when it comes to your relationship with food.

maybe even at a worse spot than you were to begin with.

Maybe your weight is on a complete roller coaster because your relationship with food is on a roller coaster.

You look back at photos from when you started your first diet thinking, my gosh, I can't believe that I thought I needed to lose weight then. What I would do to go back to that point.

Or maybe your weight hasn't even changed, but you're losing your mind with how often food is on your mind

and the escape that it provides you and you can't seem to stop craving.

It's the trying and the failing that's getting to you and messing with your head.

You've become distrusting of yourself and terrified of letting yourself down again.

At this point, you're thinking about giving up altogether because if you don't start, then you can't fail, right?

But in the back of your mind, that doesn't actually sit well with you to think about giving up completely and just accepting this for the rest of your life.

You don't want this to be the rest of your life.

You want to be able to enjoy food like a normal person. You don't want to have to say no to social events because you don't know what food's going to be around.

You want to be able to get the spontaneous ice cream with a loved one without spiraling the rest of the week. You're not living the life that you want because food is currently in charge of it.

You're not able to focus on things clearly because food is in the way. So you don't want to accept this. You really want to be free from it, but you feel like you just can't.

That's quite a sticky spot to be in, my friend. So where do you go from here?

This episode is designed to get you out of that sticky situation. you're ready for the ball to start moving forward instead of staying stuck or even worse rolling backwards.

then be sure you save this episode to come back to if you're not able to finish it in this moment.

Welcome to Nourished and Free the Podcast. I'm Michelle Yates, registered dietitian, certified health mindset coach, and with my master's in health psychology.

I take a nutrition and psychology-backed approach to helping women overcome binge eating in secret, constantly thinking about food, and the exhaustion of the all-or-nothing mentality.

Be sure you're subscribed if this is something that you need help with. And drop me a quick love note in the reviews if you're a fan of the show so that other women can find the show who are needing it.

So let's talk about what happens when you fail.

The two weeks have gone by since you started something new and you're starting to feel like you can't keep doing this much longer. motivation is gone. You're not excited about going to the grocery store to get all these clean foods anymore. You kind of just want some cookies or some You let yourself have some and then before you know it, it's gotten completely out of hand.

You throw your hands in the air and you say, just can't believe I did this again.

I knew this was gonna happen.

I guess I'll just start over Monday. Might as well enjoy this for the rest of the weekend.

Let's talk about what's actually happening though when you have this failure, so to speak,

What's actually happening is that your brain's giving you feedback. Failure is feedback.

Think about a guided missile trying to reach its target.

It's not moving in a perfectly straight line the whole way there. In fact, a lot of the times it has these mistakes and it starts going the way and it adapts and makes little tiny corrections to be sure it's still on the right path to its target.

And if the technology is advanced enough,

so that it doesn't happen again.

And you might have missed it, but this has also been happening over and over again in your own life. Think about any skill that you've had to learn. I'll give you a very elementary example because I've got a daughter in right now And we're learning the ABCs, how to form letters, spelling, writing, all the fun things. At this point in time, it's easy to forget how hard that was to learn.

But being in the position now where I'm watching my daughter learn this from scratch, how to connect letters, to form words, how to sound them out, how to write in cursive, like all the things, it's actually amazing that we ever are able to learn this in the first place.

This is a monumental task to take on. And we typically take that for granted because at this point, we're probably writing pretty fluently.

You have to figure out which letters to put together in order to make the sounds that you want. You have to then figure out how to read it when it's already done.

You have to figure out the different strokes and how to create the shapes of the letters.

Grammar is something I haven't even gotten to yet with my kindergartner and I'm not looking forward to because English, I feel so terrible for anybody listening to this that English is not your first language and you've had to learn it later in life. You are...

I hold you in high regard because I would not be able to do it as an adult. English is psychotic. Anyway, there's all these moving pieces, right? You have to put them all together and even just think about the strength in your hand as you're writing. You have to develop those motor skills in order to correctly make the shapes of the different letters and the words and so on and so forth.

Now you might be thinking, where are you going with this, Michelle? Okay, so think about as you're learning all these different moving pieces, there was a lot of mistakes that were made. So many errors. as I'm watching my daughter write her letters and spell words.

I'm correcting her in the moment because I want those mistakes to be corrected right away so that they don't keep getting reinforced and she's learning it the wrong way, so I have to be hands-on to be sure that this gets learned correctly.

That way she's set up for success and it becomes autopilot, becomes muscle memory and the autopilot is correct.

but she has to get that feedback. She has to get that feedback from me in order to correct

is that same type of course correction that I'm talking about with the missile where there's feedback, a correction, and then it's moving on its path again towards the target.

So yeah, if you learn to read or write or really any skill that took time to learn, you have evidence that you're able and capable of learning and overcoming binge eating because you have evidence that your brain neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity just means that your brain is able to adapt and change and shift and pivot.

in order to learn new things and correct and change its course.

have to take in that feedback as feedback and then correct. You can't just dismiss the failure as a moral failure. It's feedback for you to then learn from and make the appropriate adjustments.

So a binge episode, this is a deviation. That's it.

If you let it, it can tell you a lot about yourself. It can tell you what you were looking for, what you were really needing in that moment, what your thoughts and beliefs are about food and your body and yourself, even others, what beliefs are underneath the surface that are driving so many behaviors, what skill isn't strong enough yet.

we can turn something that feels like a failure into a simple calibration.

every backslide or shift into something we didn't actually want to happen gives us more precise information of what needs to be adjusted to move forward.

So you don't reach the goal by never veering off course. That would mean you were perfect and nobody is. You reach it by correcting faster and you can't shame yourself for veering off course because otherwise that makes correction impossible. If you're sitting there beating yourself up, it's so hard to learn from that because now you're just in a terrible state of mind and you're closed off and your ability to learn.

is way harder to access.

With our clients that we work with, we do not expect perfection. And a pretty refreshing thing for a lot of them because most of our clients would describe themselves as perfectionists or type A personalities or very black and white. They're used to requiring perfection of themselves

then being asked for that perfection as well from the various diets they've done or meal plans or whatever. Especially if you've done Weight Watchers and you're supposed to follow a certain amount of points or lose a certain amount of weight. I I've heard stories of women going to Weight Watchers meetings, stepping on the scale and they gained pounds.

and that was deemed as a failure. Well, you need to try harder because of a increase in your weight. I mean, just ridiculous,

When it comes to diet and weight and health, we get trained in this perfectionistic mentality that you're either doing it right or you're doing it wrong. There's no in-between.

But that couldn't be farther from reality because health has so many layers to it. And our bodies also deserve way more credit than that. Having a simple cookie is not going to give you instant diabetes, right? Like let's not put so much pressure on ourselves, nor is it gonna make you gain 10 pounds. Your body can handle a freaking cookie. So let's change.

The expectations a bit here, we're not fighting for perfection. In fact, the failures can be some of the most valuable feedback for you in reaching your goals.

That's why our clients are incredibly successful long-term is because we're not trying to white-knuckle or outsmart binge urges. We're trying to just get them to not even appear in the first place. We're doing a lot of deeper work to make sure whatever those urges.

our results of have been addressed, right? We're addressing those issues in those areas that need healing. And that, I mean, that takes a lot of work. That's some deep stuff. And we don't expect people to suddenly get it right on day one, or even get it right for the rest of their lives. Because again, we're human, we're complicated people, we have emotions, we have stress in our lives, we've got...

jobs, kids, vacations, whatever. You shouldn't expect yourself to never struggle again with food or your body because, again, you're human. Life is gonna life. But instead, we want to be curious about where things are falling apart and learn from it and see what needs to be adjusted and adapted to move forward.

Something that I actually say all the time to my clients is, I love when you fail. And it's not because I want you to be unsuccessful, it's because I want you to be successful. And the failure is some of the best, most rich teaching moments where we're able to figure out what hasn't been working or what did we miss.

Because I very much want to take an approach with our clients where we're not leaving any stones left unturned. I don't want things to pop up 10 years later that it's like, shoot, I didn't realize this was going on underneath the surface all these years. Now I'm back to square one with binge eating or eating in secret, constantly thinking about food. Because of that, there's going to be a lot of times where it's like, there's something else that we haven't addressed yet. There's something else that we need to dig into more.

And we wouldn't know that unless they had those failures. And so that makes it very, very helpful to be sure that they are not only getting results when they're working with us, but also that they keep those results.

The fastest progress that I see with my clients or the biggest breakthroughs is almost always right after they've had a bad day or a bad week and they feel like they had a backslide.

Whenever a client reaches out and is like, I'm so mad at myself, I'm so frustrated, I binged last night, I don't know why, now I'm spiraling, I'm blaming myself, I feel like giving up. I always told them, I'm so glad you told me, and I'm also really glad this happened. Let's understand it more. Let's talk about it more and figure out.

why this happened and then they learn so much.

And honestly, if they didn't have somebody to talk it through with those failures, those mess ups and backslides, they would just keep spiraling after that. They would give up. But because they can bring that to us and say, here's what happened, what do you make of this? We're able to troubleshoot and reverse engineer and like, hey, what could we have done different so that that didn't happen? Great, let's apply that next time.

and see what happens. And again, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. That's okay. We'll adjust and personalize and make sure that you do finally get to a place where this isn't happening anymore.

I need you to hear me when I say this if you are struggling with binge eating. A binge is not a moral failure. Overeating is not a moral failure.

It's information and you can either use that information or ignore it.

if you ignore it and if you avoid.

you're never actually collecting the information that you need to change.

Right? And honestly,

it is way more damaging long term to just stay stuck in this place and never let this failure teach you anything.

Imagine if my kindergartner, whenever she messed up, I just was like avoided the mistake and was like, whatever. It's uncomfortable to tell somebody, you know, what could have been done differently. I don't want her to have to put in the effort to change. I can be scary and unfamiliar. So I'm just going to let it be.

Would that actually be helping my daughter? I'm setting her up for an actual failure, right? Because, I mean, I've been saying the word failure a lot. Honestly, I don't really like the word failure because it feels so heavy. It's more like, yeah, there can be these mistakes. There can be these slip-ups. There can be these things that ⁓ don't go right.

And a lot of times we make that mean more than it does. We assign the word failure to it and there's like this giant red X that we did it wrong, we messed up, there's no going back, there's no fixing this. And so we make it into a way bigger deal than it needs to be. But it really isn't a failure unless you fully give up, right? And if I gave up on correcting my daughter and never corrected her mistakes,

then I would be failing her. I would be failing her. Right? She wouldn't ever learn. And then she wouldn't be able to function as a member in society if nobody can read her writing. Right? And that would overall harm her. I would even venture to say that's not loving her well. That's not caring for her well.

I do love my daughter. I want her to not be self-conscious about her handwriting or be afraid of making mistakes because she's going to make mistakes. How can I teach her to take those mistakes in stride, learn from them, and move

So here's what I'm hoping you're picking up from this is that there's no reason to run from mistakes. There's no reason to try to avoid them completely. And this absolutely applies to your relationship with food and trying to find normalcy with it and peace and quiet in your mind. You can't run from mistakes. They're going to happen. But what you do with them is what matters.

Are you going to label it as a failure and then make that failure mean that you're not good enough, you're never going to be able to fix this, it's a you issue and your brain is just broken? Or you going to recognize that mistakes are so natural and they're actually very helpful information for what you need to adjust and how you need to pivot?

Failure is feedback, my friend. Don't let it be a moral judgment that you're putting on yourself. and don't let the fear of failure stop you from learning from it.

If you try to avoid it, you're going to stay stuck like this forever. Embrace the failure. Allow those to be learning opportunities. Allow it to be feedback.

like with when I'm teaching my daughter how to write, sometimes you need somebody looking over your shoulder to let you know where your mistake was and how to fix it. If that's you and you're finding that you have no idea what it is that's leading you to these mistakes or to these failures and how to get on track and what to learn from them, then let us help you. I would love to be a part of your journey.

clearly a judgment-free zone where we welcome failures.

you know, a lot of times I'll hear from women that they are so desperate to be free from feeling the way they feel around food and in their bodies, but they're afraid of failing.

And my response to that is, why would you be afraid of that? It can give you so much information. And it's necessary in order to finally be binge free. You're gonna have to have some hard days in order to learn. It's just life.

This is ultimately why our clients end up being successful long term because we don't avoid failure, we embrace the times that it happens and we learn from it and we pivot and we adjust.

We let those be moments of a spotlight being shown in an area that we missed and we figure out, okay, what hole needs to be filled.

If you're somebody who has done diet after diet or tried everything out there and you're afraid of getting professional help because you don't want it to be another thing that you spend money on and then you're like, my gosh, I once again let myself down. I didn't do it right.

I'd love to be with you in those moments. I'd love to see you fail so that I can help you succeed. Let me be there for you. Let our team be there with you as you're navigating something that's so vulnerable and scary and hard because you deserve it. It's time to have a life free from constant thoughts of food, free from hiding, and free from secrecy.

Don't be afraid of failure. What's way scarier than failure is avoiding it altogether, because then you'll never grow, and you'll never learn.

then you'll never get to a place where you can be free with food.

If you're ready to learn from your failures, have somebody look into your situation and understand why is this happening over and over again? What needs to be changed? Identify the blind spots and fill the holes with you. Check out the show notes for more information on my program, Nourished and Free.

Me and my team would love to support you and help you finally overcome this once and for all. We want to make this your last stop, the last thing you ever do to try to fix your thing with food. We're here for you and we don't expect you to be perfect. Actually, we prefer that you're not.

regardless of if you need that support or not, I hope you found today's episode helpful and ⁓ important mindset shift as you move forward in your relationship with food. Be sure you share it with a friend if you think that they would find it helpful as well.

next time, live nourished and free.