Data Is How I Stop Doubting Myself Blog Post #5

I was trained to distrust my own reality — and how tracking gave me a way back to truth.

If you've ever looked at your own life and thought, "Am I being dramatic… or it's not that big of a deal, or man what is wrong with me?" — this one's for you.

So many women have been trained to second-guess their reality. Not always through one big moment, but through a thousand small ones: being dismissed, minimized, talked over, told we're "too sensitive," or made to feel like our memory, our body, our instincts can't be trusted. Once that doubt gets planted, it doesn't stay inside the container it was built in — it leaks into everything: including food, your body, your healing. It can become a loud voice or a soft second-guesser, but it's there. And it is impacting your life.

The Weird Thing About Proof

I've noticed about myself: I can do everything I say I'm doing — and still look for proof, because I'm still learning to trust my own experience. This is my conditioning that I am working on undoing.

With the Hash Eating Project, I can say "I'm eating Hash friendly" and still feel like it isn't true — the results aren't coming fast enough, the up and down glance of my body from others as soon as I make a statement, the judgement and stares, I feel like an imposter and start to second guess. My workaround, while I retrain my mind-soul connection, is this: I log meals, I score them, and I track the trends. I have the data right there, clearly showing I'm living what I'm claiming.

But sometimes even the data isn't enough to quiet that nagging feeling. So I check for more confirmation: the photos, the scale, the fit of my clothes even the watch band notching smaller. Any tiny marker that says: Yes, this is real, you're not imagining it.

That used to make me feel a little crazy — why do I need so much external confirmation? Until I realized that I am undoing decades of gaslighting, right now through my food.

I hope my experience can help you see it differently too.

Curiosity Instead of Punishment

I'm not using these data points to beat myself up anymore. I'm using them to get curious about what my body is telling me.

Not: "Why am I not further?" — But: "What's changing? What's working? What patterns are showing up?"

Not: "I'm failing." — But: "What is my body communicating right now?"

Data isn't my weapon anymore. It's my mirror.

It helps me confirm reality — especially when my nervous system has been trained to doubt it.

Hashimoto's Didn't Ruin Me — It Woke Me Up

I'm learning to live and be the best version of me because of my Hashimoto's diagnosis. Not in spite of it.

Honestly this diagnosis — and learning how to eat and live differently — might have saved my life. It forced me to stop and look closely in order to separate what's actually happening in my body from what other people and society were telling me was happening.

It forced me to define my reality for myself. And that is unbelievably empowering.

I Want This for Every Woman

So many of us have been food-shamed, body-shamed, dismissed, told we're "fine" when we're not — made to believe our lived experience isn't accurate.

Once you've been trained to doubt yourself, you reach for control in whatever way you can. For a lot of women, that becomes food: restriction, punishment, obsession — or maybe all of them.

What if instead, we took our power back through awareness? Not control or perfection just a

wareness.

This is what it feels like for me: using data to confirm that I am who I say I am. That I'm doing what I said I'd do. That I'm building trust with my own body again.

And the quiet gift in all of it is this: I can look back at the old version of me — the one who didn't trust herself — and simply say:

"You weren't crazy. You were learning."

Just one more reason to love data.

So glad you're here,

Elena

Want the tools I use to track without shame?

Everything is waiting for you right here — no perfection required.

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