Just curious, do you hate Mondays like me because of diet brain?

I used to hate Mondays. I never understood why until I realized that diet culture got me feeling the Monday blues.

The dreaded Monday came when the party was over 😬

This kind of thinking played tricks on me in divorce.

You’re probably thinking, what the hell does diet brain have to do with divorce??? LOL

Actually, a lot!

Diet culture caused a whole shit storm of drama for me in divorce.

It’s the whole notion of how you do anything is how you do everything.

In my journey towards healing through divorce, I had to come face to face with those dark shadow sides of myself, the ones lingering from childhood.

If you are not familiar with shadow work, look up Carl Jung. He was a Swiss psychiatrist and the father of shadow work.

Let me simplify it for you. We all have a shadow side to ourselves. The dark shadow side is the undesirable aspect of yourself. The parts of yourself that you hide, which is why it is called a shadow side, you hide behind that shadow in hopes that nobody will see that side of yourself.

I so desperately didn’t want to face the dark side of myself—those feelings of unworthiness, comparison, and lack.

It’s human to have a dark shadow side. All of us have light and darkness because everything in the universe has duality, but at some point, we buy into the belief that the shadow side of ourselves is “bad.” So we hide it and suppress it and never talk about these feelings.

My divorce MAGNIFIED my dark shadows. All those feelings of comparison and unworthiness cast a shadow on the light that I had within.

All of a sudden, our divorce became a competition. Who was the better parent? We battled for our children’s love and approval, and we let our pride and ego get the best of us.

I wasted lots of time stuck in the hamster wheel. We were getting nowhere, spinning with the unconscious behavior of everyone involved in my divorce story.

After doing extensive work on myself, I finally realized that divorce was not the starting point of those feelings of comparison and lack. When I sat with my shadow side, instead of running from it, and traced it down to the inception, I realized that all of it started when I bought into the belief that I wasn’t worthy unless my body was at a specific weight.

Buying into this lie caused me to spend three decades on diets. Yes, three decades, on every diet imaginable. I was never not on a diet. I didn’t trust myself unless I was on a diet.

I grew up with a mom that was a yo-yo dieter, and I thought that’s what women did, we diet. That’s when I first broke trust with my body, the vehicle that allows me to have the human experience. I believed that the diet knew better than me and forgot how intelligent and intuitive our body is.

Diet culture thrives in comparison and lack! A multibillion-dollar industry that flourishes when we break trust in the divine intelligence of the body. But that’s a whole other discussion in itself.

Healing didn’t stop there, although this is how comparison took root. To heal completely, I needed to get down to the source and extract the entire weed.

In order to not recreate the same experience, we need resolve. To be completely transparent, plant medicine helped me ultimately extract the weed. I thought I had, but the intelligence of the plant showed me otherwise. Ayahuasca, a master plant, brought me down to the core of what I was not willing to face.

When I sat with the medicine in meditation, she (Ayahuasca) brought me face to face with precisely what I needed to heal. I found myself standing directly in front of my mother. I began to ask her why she never dissuaded me from being on a diet.

I was never an overweight kid, nor did I have any medical conditions that would call for being on a specific diet. I was only following in my mother’s footsteps. Because she was on every diet, so was I.

In that meditation, I was angry. I wanted to know why my mom couldn’t tell me, “Marisa, you don’t need a diet. You are perfect just the way you are.” I realized at that moment that she couldn’t give to me what she couldn’t give to herself. She never learned how to love and accept herself completely, so how would she provide that to me?

At that moment, I forgave her. She was only able to love me to the capacity she could love herself. I forgave her for not knowing any better and then forgave myself for buying into the belief that I needed anything on the outside to make me worthy of love.

It has been a journey, let me tell you. But I finally gave up the need to diet, I no longer hate Mondays, and comparison lost its grip on me in divorce.

I could have spent more decades distracted by surface-level stuff and continued to spin in the hamster wheel. But doing the work to face the shadow side was my ticket to freedom.

Shadow work is something I talk more extensively about in my 90-program, From Survival to Freedom: Heal Through Divorce & Rediscover Your Truth. If you want to find out more about the program, set up a call with me or send me an email. We are getting started in September, and space is limited.

Oh, and be sure to check out my free training…How to Rediscover Your Identity in Divorce!