Hello! I've been a lurker off and on since 2012 when I quit dieting postpartum and made peace with food briefly. Fast forward to a couple years postpartum with my third child, in 2015, and I discovered macros. Since then I have tracked VERY religiously off and on, even through a fourth pregnancy in 2021, maintained through breastfeeding in 2022 until I hit a mental wall this last winter and I just can't do it anymore. Like lots of other people in the world I had grand plans of starting January with a strict cut and losing the last 10-15 lbs of baby weight. January first rolled around and I started strong, hitting everything on the head, every gram of protein, fat, fiber, and carbs was perfect, zeroed out. But I realized I didn't want to live that way anymore. So I've spent January downloading and deleting the same damn calorie tracking app on my phone while I try to un-intertwine my self worth from the way my body looks and my need for control. I'm tired of paying for a new program, a new exercise video, a new coach, always hoping they're going to make me skinny, and by proxy, happy. I know that being skinnier doesn't make me happier, I struggled just as much at a lower weight with feelings of insecurity and body shame, but it's hard to not feel as if I need to DO something. I just picked up the Intuitive Eating workbook, I read the book years ago, but I never did the workbook, thinking I didn't need out. Well, turns out I do. I really want to get off the roller coaster of dieting and exercising like a mad woman only to feel guilty for skipping cake on my kids birthdays and pretending I like plain grilled chicken when I go on a date with my husband. I used to love cooking, and that really fell by the wayside when I was in the midst of macro counting as it quickly becomes tedious trying to calculate out every ingredient in a fridge clean out soup down to the gram. I've embraced making sourdough bread this year, and so far my kids have loved every golden crackly loaf. For me it's been a cathartic experience. I rarely allowed myself to eat bread and butter together while counting macros, saving my fats for ice cream or banking up enough calories for a glass of wine with my dinner. Finally, I don't want to model my weird food behaviors to my daughters anymore. It didn't seem to matter when they were littler, but now at 10 and 9 I see them watching me. My long history of disordered eating behavior started with my mom standing me on a scale at 10 yrs old and telling me I needed to lose weight. She knew I was sneaking food, but unbeknownst to myself the binge eating I was doing at the time was due to the unresolved trauma of the sexual abuse I had gone through from my grandfather that my parents didn't take me to therapy for. Thankfully, the binge eating didn't stick around, but the feelings of worthlessness over my inability to control my own body did. Any advice, resources, commiseration, etc. would be appreciated. Sometimes it just helps to send the thoughts out into the void and know I'm not alone.