Learning to Live in the Actual World

What nine years has taught me about the difference between a program and a life

There's a question I used to hear a lot, usually from myself at around 11pm:

"How come I can't eat like normal people?"

It's such a specific kind of despair, isn't it. Not anger, exactly. More like bewilderment. Everyone else seems to be managing this thing called eating without it taking up quite so much real estate in their brain. One cookie, done. Half a serving of pasta, fine. Meanwhile you're doing a complicated cost-benefit analysis in the middle of what was supposed to be a dinner party.

I want to talk about that word. Normal. Because I think it's quietly doing a lot of damage.

Normal Has Always Been Changing

There's an episode of the Life Coach School Podcast — episode 243, if you want to look it up — where Brooke Castillo asks a deceptively simple question about what normal eating actually means. It stopped me cold when I first heard it, because I realized I had never questioned the premise.

I assumed normal was some stable target that other people had hit and I had missed.

But think about smoking for a moment. Smoking everywhere. On planes. In restaurants, at the table next to yours. In hospital waiting rooms. Doctors recommending particular brands. Nobody questioned it — it was simply what people did. And when the first bans came, people were furious. The bars would close. Culture would collapse. You couldn't do that to people.

Now it isn't normal. In one generation, completely.

Ultra-processed food — the stuff that's been specifically engineered to override your satiety signals, that activates the same neural reward pathways as cocaine, that changes your gut microbiome within 48 hours — is currently normal. Everywhere. In every break room, at every celebration, in every gas station from here to wherever you're reading this.

Your nervous system's strong reaction to it is not the aberration.

The food is.

The Program Is Not the Life

Between November 2016 and November 2018, 170 pounds came off my body. I reversed Type 2 diabetes, normalized my cholesterol, got off all my medications. By any external measure, that was a stunning success.

And then real life happened.

My father declined, then died. My mother's dementia progressed over years — those long, disorienting years of watching someone pack up the boxes of their mind and slowly move to another dimension. I broke my foot. I had arthritis. Business stress. The particular exhaustion of being the responsible oldest daughter, managing everything, for parents who could no longer manage themselves.

Through all of it, I maintained my abstinence from the foods that harm me. I wasn't going off plan. I wasn't eating my feelings. I was eating exactly the way I always had.

And I gained weight anyway.

Elevated cortisol increases abdominal fat storage, creates insulin resistance, and disrupts every hormone involved in weight regulation — regardless of what's on your plate. Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a charging tiger and watching both your parents die slowly. It responds the same way. And one of those responses is holding onto weight as a survival strategy.

I wasn't failing the program. My body was responding intelligently to a genuinely overwhelming situation.

Six months after my mother died — without changing a single thing about my eating — my body started returning to its previous weight. The stress lifted. The cortisol dropped. The biology cooperated, because it finally could.

What I had to learn — and it took longer than the weight loss, and was harder, and is ongoing — was how to live in the actual world. Not the controlled world of a program. The world with grief and joy and surprises and family dinners and ordinary Tuesdays that somehow go sideways.

That is a completely different project than losing weight. And it takes longer. And nobody talks about it.

What You're Actually Learning

When someone tells me they've been "in and out" of their program — struggling, then good, then struggling again — I notice they're describing that whole arc as failure.

I'd like to offer a different reading.

What if that period isn't you failing at your program?

What if it's you learning to navigate actual life — with real complexity, real nervous system activations, real history — as someone whose system works the way your system works?

Those are not the same project. And they don't have the same timeline.

The abstinence part — removing the foods that harm you — that can happen in weeks. The neurological change, the identity shift, the learning to trust your body, the loosening of the death grip while maintaining the boundary, the turning down of the obsessive noise — that happens in months and years.

Brooke Castillo's episode is called "Normal Eating?" — with a question mark. Because the question is actually worth asking. What are you comparing yourself to? What is the baseline you've decided you're failing to hit? And did you choose that baseline, or did someone hand it to you?

What Nine Years Has Taught Me

I don't weigh myself anymore. Not because I'm avoiding something — because the number was never the point. What I maintain is abstinence from the foods that cloud my thinking and steal my energy, because when I do, I can think clearly enough to write, show up for the people I love, create rather than just survive.

Weight is just gravity's opinion about my body. It has very little to do with whether I'm living vibrantly.

Here's what I've actually been building over nine years, the part that doesn't show up on a before-and-after:

• Learning to recognize which situation I'm actually in — alarm vs. habit vs. transition vs. genuine hunger
• Building enough automaticity that most of it doesn't require conscious decisions anymore
• Developing the observer — the part that can notice what's happening without collapsing into it
• Slowly, painstakingly, learning that I can be in a hard moment without food being the only answer
• Finding out what else actually works for my particular nervous system

None of that is linear. None of it looks good on a chart. All of it is real.

The Permission You Might Need

If you've been navigating something hard — grief, caregiving, health challenges, transitions, or just the ordinary relentless weight of being a person in this particular world — and your relationship with food has been messier than you'd like:

You are not failing at recovery.

You are learning to live.

Those are different things, and they deserve different measures.

Perfecting abstinence is not the same project as learning to navigate actual life. The first one has an endpoint. The second one is the work of a lifetime — and that's not a consolation prize. That's just what it means to be someone who takes this seriously enough to stay in it.

Normal will keep changing. Your nervous system will keep learning. And you are further along than the verdict you've been giving yourself.

With love and light,  Sonja

transformwithsonja.com