The accommodator style was adapted from the Thomas-Kilmann conflict model.
Think: Am I doing enough?, How can I adapt/make this work?
Feel: Guilt
Behaviors: People please, rescue others (so they don’t feel any discomfort)
Self-Sabotage: Keeps score
Frames Situations: Either/Or (my way or their way)
More About the Accommodator
When diet plans don’t provide the deeper fulfillment or results that accommodating provides, food returns to be the main source of reward and connection and the desire or “motivation” to prioritize healthy eating fades. Already low on energy from accommodating, the energy drain from dieting makes us feel more bored and deprived.
Overtime, the accommodator feels more and more deprived and looks for more reasons to “cheat”, like forgetting to pack a healthy lunch or after a drainig day of accommodating everyone else. This leads Accommodators to feel they have an abnormal love of food and it’s harder for them to eat healthy.
The challenge and life-changing opportunity for accommodators:
Make your body, needs and dreams the authority you want to please. You must listen to your body to understand what foods accommodate you. You have to understand and learn that people pleasing and trying to rescue others from discomfort isn’t the source of your value or the best way to serve the world around you.
Listening to and recognizing that “putting your oxygen mask on first” doesn’t mean others are going to suffer allows us to be more creative, fulfilled and serve the world around us in a much healthier way (that doesn’t burn you out).
The relief is in transforming the either/or mindset and realizing that you don’t have to choose between yourself or the people or work you love (and that work doesn’t have to be so much!).
An accurate diagnosis of why you fall off track is critical. It’s the most strategic, effective place to start to. To begin to learn what works for your body, not accommodate someone else’s plan:
Try the free Truce with Food mini-course
Accommodators who don’t address the root cause will continue to burn themselves out and make food a reward and a way to connect and spend our time (for example, weight loss and wellness become our main hobby). Resources are diverted from finding other fulfilling pursuits. A self-fulfilling prophecy results as we come to love food more than others because it’s serving as a source of meaning beyond taste.
To learn more on this topic, check out this secret Insatiable podcast episode or transcript.
Be well and enjoy the journey,
