Why your struggle with food isn’t your fault

Have you found yourself thinking:

“I’ve done every diet under the sun and still feel stuck.”

You are far from alone. Most clients we work with at Ayla Health feel the same way. They are frustrated, tired, and quietly wondering, “What’s wrong with me?”

There is nothing wrong with you. Even if you:

Can’t stick to a diet for any length of time
Hate fasting or fasting makes you feel awful or starving
Feel anxious when you’re hungry
Binge at the end of ‘good’ day
Lose motivation after a few ‘bad days’
Can’t face cooking another dinner after a mentally exhausting day

These are not personal failings. They are human realities. And the real problem? Diet culture is lying to you about what success should look like.

Diets Oversimplify a Very Complex Thing

Food, nutrition, and eating are complex. Our culture make these sweeping statement about just “eating clean” or “cutting carbs” but this falls majorly short of actually helping you build a sustainable, healthy eating pattern you can consistently stick to. The way we eat is shaped by:

Our culture and upbringing
Mental health and emotional state
Genetics and our resulting metabolism
Financial constraints and food access
Cooking skills, time, and energy
Hormones, sleep, and stress
And the 273 decisions you made before dinner even crossed your mind

Yet most diet plans reduce success to a number on the scale. They praise rigid control and restrictiveness, ignoring how your body, brain, and real life actually work. When that kind of system inevitably fails, it’s easy to assume you were the problem.

You weren’t. You’ve just got lots going on when it comes to food and eating and it’s not possible for any diet, no matter how many claims it makes, to address the complexities of your life.

What Happens When We Oversimplify

Fad diets and weight-loss programs often say things like “just eat whole foods,” or “it’s simple, just eat less and move more.”

But reducing nutrition to “simple rules” ignores the emotional, psychological, and behavioural layers underneath how we eat. When you oversimplify something complex, you set yourself up to fail. And after you fail, you feel ashamed and defeated that it doesn’t work.

And worse? You lose trust in yourself.

A New Way Forward: Build, Don’t Fight

Instead of fighting your body, what if you worked with it? Instead of ditching your whole week after one off day, what if you just… kept going? What if you set yourself more realistic and sustainable eating goals that you could actually stick to, even on your worst day?

That’s what actually creates change.

At Ayla Health, we teach nutrition as a series of small, realistic habits, not as a set of food rules. Our app helps you build food confidence step-by-step, based on science and behaviour change psychology. We don’t ask you to be perfect. We help you learn, develop and practice a range of skills for eating that last a lifetime.

Because building a healthy relationship with food isn’t about more willpower. It’s about:

Understanding your patterns
Learning what works for your body
Creating habits you can stick with, even when life is chaotic
Letting go of guilt when things don’t go perfectly

You Deserve Grace, Not Guilt

You deserve support that understands food and eating is not just physical, it’s emotional, social and cultural as well. That lets you be healthy and human at the same time.

You do not need to start another diet.

You need a different approach. One grounded in evidence, self-compassion, and real life.

Ready to ditch the dieting cycle for good?

The Ayla Health app gives you bite-sized, habit-based guidance to transform your eating patterns without stress or guilt. No tracking. No food rules. Just small wins that build momentum over time.