Emotional Eating, it's Not About the Food

When your mind is constantly preoccupied with food, weight, and your body, it may be difficult to recognize that your struggles are really not about food at all. Most people who struggle with emotional eating have a deeper understanding of food in relation to studies, diets, and health than they’d care to share. When we can explore our food history to begin to see where our patterns were first picked up, we can more clearly see how it’s not information we are lacking. Rather, we want to explore how it came to be that food became the most accessible coping tool for emotional pain, which is about emotional avoidance and really has nothing to do with the food itself. 

If you have been stuck in yo-yo dieting struggles for much many years, gaining and losing the same X amount of weight over and over again, it feels like “it must be me, I must be the problem.” However, the awareness that it is actually NOT about the food can be difficult to wrap your head around because food and body thoughts constantly preoccupy your mind. When this awareness, it’s not about the food, can be fully internalized, it can begin to set free the feelings of failure and shame that a yo-yo dieting history can create. Diet culture has instilled the belief that a diet can save us, that it IS about the food, that a diet can solve all of our body-image struggles and give us confidence and happiness. We now have a lot of research and data that shows quite the opposite, that diets actually have a nearly 96% failure rate, and yet they make the dieter feel as though it’s their fault. The culture is changing, however, it’s slow as these beliefs are deeply embedded and extremely pervasive.

Most people have a food story. A story that begins with their body being up for discussion from a very young age. One that begins with being put on a diet very early in their life. One that begins with not being allowed to eat things their siblings were allowed to because of their body size. One that begins with food being offered as the only sign they received from care givers of being loved or cared for. One that begins with food being an escape from loneliness, isolation, fear, and pain. One where they were told to ignore their hunger/full cues in order to clean their plates, or due to guilt of hungry children in other countries. One where access to food was scarce and inconsistent. One where food was a punishment. One where a parent actively restricted their food, commented on their own and other people’s bodies with constant judgement. No matter what your food story is about, the middle, the place where we can recognize that it’s not about the food, is where there is an opportunity to seize the moment and develop a deeper self-awareness. When we can fully understand that it’s not about the food, then we are free to explore, then what is it actually about?

Writing out your food story can be deeply healing and meaningful. In both my online course and workbook, I offer guidance to go through this process as an exercise as it’s an essential component in the process of healing your relationship with food. Ideally we all want food to be just food. We all want food to be something we eat for nourishment, pleasure, connection, and to feel good. We want to stop the food noise, body checking, and just feel good. If you have a complicated relationship with food, or one where food is both a problem for you as well as the solution to your problem, we have to interrupt the cycle and begin to create openings for the relationship and patterns to change. With any relationship, there needs to be awareness, honesty, shared experience, and open, respectful communication. In order to heal and transform our relationship with food, as well as with ourselves, we have to unlearn the old beliefs, stories, and fear of food and our bodies from the toxicity of the past to one of mutual respect and care.

When you examine the past, it’s not about drudging up pain and suffering, or pointing fingers and blaming, it’s about awareness. When we have a deeper understanding of how and why our relationship to food has become one of struggle, shame, and even contempt, we can begin to unravel, understand and hold the past with curiosity and compassion. When we start with awareness we can begin to develop a roadmap for ourselves to what we want from where we’ve been. When you know it’s not about the food, you know that there is no diet, wellness plan, or workout that will make you satisfied with food or your body. When you know it’s not about the food you can take a deep dive and excavate the roots of the emotions, the hurt, the struggles, and the external noise that became internal dialogue. When you know it’s not about the food, you can clearly see that healing is possible by walking through the wounds of the past, and into the hopeful space of the vision you can create for yourself. 

When time allows, spend some time writing out your food story and examine your own history. Then take anything that feels harmful, toxic, and just untrue, and begin to rewrite your story, write out your desires for your new, more loving, inclusive, and compassionate story going forward from today.

How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 7: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

Principle 7 of Intuitive Eating is: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness. This is a big one—and one of the most challenging as emotions and food often get entangled. It can be much more challenging to discern emotional eating from say a hunger or full cue as you are working with the principles of intuitive eating. Emotional eating can also become tangled up in specific thought pattern or a belief (or lie) about a diet as you are working to reject diet mentality.

Coping with your emotions with kindness allows an opportunity for food to be just food. It’s another simple but not so easy concept as you are working towards not using food as a coping skill to manage your internal emotional experiences that create discomfort and challenges. This process of coping with emotions with kindness is about understanding, listening to, receiving the messages from and responding to your emotions in a nonjudgmental and compassionate way.  This process really allows you to delve deeply into the root of emotional eating.

Many of us learned very early in our lives to believe and feel that our emotions are invalid, inconvenient, dramatic or unnecessary based on how they you were treated when expressing your emotions as a child. If you heard, “you’re too sensitive” “you’re so dramatic” “I don’t have time for this (temper tantrum, crying spell and so on…” “I’ll give you something to cry about” “crybaby” or “turn on the tears and see if you get your way” just to name a few, then you were taught a negative message about feeling and expressing your emotions. This becomes the root of emotional eating (or any other negative coping pattern).

These statements are unfortunately quite common, and all are quite damaging, especially when heard repeatedly. It begins to feel futile or unsafe to express your feelings and then eventually you either up the expressions in an attempt to be heard or stop and cut yourself off from you emotions all together.

The point here is definitely not to place blame, that just creates a sense of being a victim and creates a feeling of helplessness. The point here is to allow yourself to understand where you picked up the belief that your emotions were not valid, inconvenient etc... The point is to develop awareness as to where your relationship to your emotions became uncomfortable or all together denied. When you avoid or deny yourself the experience of feeling your feelings, you learn to stuff, numb, suppress and repress your emotions rather than express them in a healthy manner. You deserve to feel all of your feelings and all of your feelings are valid. Period. However, what you do with them and how you respond to your emotions can make a huge impact on the quality of your life.

If you feel completely at a loss when it comes to naming, understanding, identifying and exposing your emotions, that is ok! You can do an internet search for a feelings wheel and download and print it out to begin to become more familiar with emotions in general. This process can feel daunting at first because if you learned to repress your feelings from a young age you most likely have been working hard to keep them deeply suppressed, locked away deep inside never to be seen again. However, feelings don’t just go away, they are all still there and ready for you to open yourself to understanding, accepting and managing them in healthy way. I recommend you use the following process to begin the process of becoming more comfortable with your feelings/emotions simply as a concept. Then you can begin to explore your own in relation to your life more in depth. 

To start, go through the feelings wheel and list each feeling in a journal, one by one, starting at the center of the wheel. Write down after the feeling name a time you remember feeling that way or something that might create that feeling inside you. Then write down where you feel that feeling in your body (it’s ok if this isn’t clear right away, just try). Write down the opposite feeling state (e.g. angry—peaceful, happy—sad) for each feeling. After completing this exercise with all of the feelings on the wheel, use this journal daily as a place to release your feelings.

Our feelings/emotions show up as a message about how we are experiencing our lives. They are incredibly valuable information. It’s super important to use the concept of nonjudgment with your emotions/feelings. When you categorize your feelings as good or bad you are more likely to attempt to avoid the “bad” feelings. However, if you are nonjudgmental in your view of your emotions they can be more accessible to understand.

Your feelings may be experienced as comfortable or uncomfortable. It’s human nature to want to avoid feeling uncomfortable. As you become more familiar with feeling states, it will be helpful to begin to get more comfortable with the discomfort of your emotions. This is where your feelings journal will be helpful. You can use the following exercise to more clearly understand and then release your feelings. Try using the process each day to reflect on an emotional experience you had (or are having) and write down:

• Name the emotion you are experiencing/experienced.

• Where do/did you feel this in your body?

• How uncomfortable is/was this feeling on a scale of 0-10? (0 being no distress present and 10 being as uncomfortable as possible)

• What messages did you receive about this feeling growing up (or in your current life)?

• What is the message this emotion has for you now, what does it want you to know?

• What does this feeling/emotion need?

• Can you give the emotion what it needs, why or why not?

• Is there something you can do to cope with this feeling in a healthy way?

• Can you let this feeling go/release it?

• What is the opposite feeling state?

• Is it possible to do something now to cultivate this opposite feeling state in this moment?

• How uncomfortable is your original feeling now on a scale of 0-10?

After going through this daily as an exercise in self-awareness and self-reflection, begin to apply it to when you are having a specific food craving. Notice if you are able to release the feelings in a healthy way, trusting that this becomes more comfortable and possible with practice.

Emotional awareness is a process and learning to identify and cope with your feelings can have a tremendously positive impact on your life, your relationships, and your relationship with food. As you open yourself to the inner workings of your emotional world, you begin to free and liberate yourself from any fear and shame you experienced in terms of expressing your feelings in your past.

Know that this is just the beginning. If you feel there is too much to uncover, it’s difficult to get in touch with your feelings or they have been too suppressed for too long, know that you can seek support, you do not have to go through this hard work alone. Find a therapist, a coach or a trusted mentor and receive the support you need. This work is tremendously powerful and you deserve to feel, appreciate, understand and experience all of your feelings.

If I Heal My Emotional Eating Will I Lose Weight?

One of the first questions that people ask me as we begin working together is: “will this process of making peace with food help me lose weight?” This is such a tough and loaded question! This question always makes me feel the frustration, disappointment and pain so many of us experience with our bodies.

The desire to lose weight has often plagued so many for so long and after trying countless diets, supplements, workouts, and other extreme measures, the weight never seems to stay off. When it begins to creep back on, most are met with many overwhelming and uncomfortable emotions such as fear, frustration, denial and even hopelessness. So, when I hear this question about weight loss, I know it comes from a place where you may not quite trust this process.

When you heal emotional eating, you are metaphorically healing yourself. The struggles with food really are not about the food. The struggles, control and fear related to food point to the challenge of managing your internal emotional world, not having your needs met, and feeling in some way inadequate or not good enough. When you address these underlying emotions that trigger cravings, overeating and even binge eating, it can be overwhelming, tiring and it’s just plain old draining. Many of us don’t even recognize how deep the roots run because it has been happening for soooo long.

The thing is, healing from those deepest roots takes dedicated time. This means that the weight loss that results with this type of work (a non-diet approach) well—it takes time. A mindful approach to making peace with food is not an overnight fix. This process is not a crash diet. This is not a one-size-fits-all plan. That is why the way I work always begins with visioning, goal setting and, at the core of the process and consistently throughout the process, mindfulness. And I know, I talk about vision and mindfulness A LOT. However these tools offer such a powerful difference in the ability to feel, understand and accept emotions. They offer a mind shift towards progress, not perfection. They offer guidance and direction from within rather than grasping from random external fleeting diets. With your vision and mindfulness as the driving force towards healing and change, we can then work with evidenced based practices to continue the growth and change. These practices include nutrition, movement, self-awareness, self-reflection, self-compassion and accountability that create real, lasting, sustainable change in mind and body.

Basically, working in a mindfulness and intuitive eating approach is flipping everything you ever thought, did or tried over and shaking it out—with intention. The work ends up creating space to feel like yourself, to become who you truly are meant to be. The hard work, focus and determination creates progress and an opening to accept all parts of yourself, all of your emotions and the whole of who you are and your life as it is unfolding.

The work with mindfulness to heal emotional eating moves you through any stuck and stagnant places and even will lift you out of back slide. The work is about addressing resistance, head on, and building resilience. Do you know how resilience builds? With hard-hard work. Resilience builds and generates itself with failure and mistakes and from shifting your perspective from “why bother?” to “I am worth this bother,” or “today I choose to bother.”

If you are ready to immerse yourself in this alternative approach, keep on reading! Freedom From Emotional Eating is an online group coaching experience that meets live weekly for twelve weeks. This course sets up the specific and valuable circumstances to create real, intentional, actual change. The processes you experience with this course are transformative and healing. Many of the modules are not easy, however they are SO worth the hard work. There are smooth transitions between the modules to keep your progress as linear as possible. Throughout the course, you have the constant support needed to create the change you desire, slowly and over time so that they are sustainable.

As you begin to integrate the changes, you have consistent support and coaching which frees your ability to transform your mindset so you can remain in action mode. Another big difference between healing emotional eating versus putting a band-aid on the symptoms is that it is a life-long journey. This process is a commitment to yourself. This process requires a sound commitment to change, and then to create the circumstances necessary for the changes to continue to evolve. Throughout the course you will add new layers of change upon change until you find you are truly living your vision for your life. You find yourself truly making peace with food. While you are creating the circumstances within your life to no longer eat when bored, sad, angry, anxious, happy, fearful, lonely or otherwise, the weight naturally comes off. However, once this course, it is no longer about the weight and more about freeing yourself of old wounds, old patterns and creating a new way of existing within your own life.

If you are ready for a different approach to heal your relationship with food, with your body and with yourself, join me and a supportive group of like-minded others going through the exact same process. Healing your relationship with food could occur one day, or this could be day one. Your choice. Your life. You get to decide when the time is right, right now. I hope you will consider joining me on this journey to healing and wholeness this spring. I look forward to walking with you along your personal path to making peace with food. If you are ready to take the start the journey, you can click here to learn more. If you’d like to be on the wait list for the next offering, reach out, I’d love to hear from you!