Creating Your OWN Personalized Emotional Cravings Protocol

When you are working to heal emotional eating, having a personalized approach is most effective. The three step cravings protocol that I recommend, Pause, Reflect, Release, is helpful for most as a guideline. However, what you do within each phase will help you make it your own. When you have a personalized approach, it feels more authentic and doable and is far more likely to be sustainable.

When you find the tools that work for you, you want to practice them consistently. Awareness builds with effort and consistency. Self-awareness will continue to grow as you become more and more comfortable understanding and accepting your internal emotional world. I emphasize the acceptance process as it is absolutely vital to healing. When you understand the inner workings of your own mind, you create a tremendous capacity to heal, grow and accept yourself and others without judgment.

As you continue to more effectively manage your emotional food cravings, you create a sense of mastery which inevitably increases your experience of internal emotional comfort. When you no longer fear your feelings but instead understand, embrace and deeply accept them, you are essentially understanding, embracing and deeply accepting yourself.

The process of making peace with food is the process of making peace with yourself. With emotional, stress and disordered eating, it is never actually about the food, it is more about a limited acceptance of yourself and a limited ability to connect with yourself in a meaningful way. When you place conditions in order to accept yourself completely, you leave yourself open to creating negative cognitions about yourself such as feeling not good enough, inadequate or as though you have to be perfect.

These negative cognitions are not useful, generally untrue and hold you back from knowing yourself and caring for yourself. When you are not caring for yourself and believing the negative cognitions as if they are true, you will most likely lack motivation. As you become more emotionally aware you build confidence, you are able to believe in yourself and your capability to feel strong and healthy. Releasing the old negative cognitions and subsequent thought patterns is essential.

As you work with your own personal emotional cravings protocol, you will feel empowered in the moment, you get to choose how to manage a specific emotional craving. As you build your determination to use your protocol consistently, you will strengthen your mindset and make the best choice possible in the moment.

When you think about the three specific steps, Pause, Reflect, Release and creating a personalized protocol that works for you, it is helpful to know the specific element of each that you find to be useful.

Within the Pause phase, what helps you Pause? Do you prefer to set a timer for 1-5 minutes in the moment of awareness that you are mindlessly or emotionally eating? What is helpful next? Have a glass of water and wait for the timer to go off? Do a deep breathing exercise? Determining the specifics of your pause that work for you will help you personalize each step into a useful, actionable tool for managing your food cravings. Once you establish the technique that works best for you, use it consistently in order to effectively utilize the Pause phase.

During the Reflection phase, what works most effectively for you to Reflect on your emotional experience? What proactive element can you incorporate to make this Reflection time useful and effective? Is it helpful for you to talk about your emotion? Do you prefer to write in a journal? Does taking a walk and pondering your emotions help? Do you need to take some space away from the emotion first and practice mindfulness or relaxation and then take time to reflect?

Find what reflective process works for you and helps you identify the why behind your emotion. Once you Reflect you can take time to make a choice on how to respond to the specific emotion. If something needs to be done, decide when you will take action on it.

As you move into the Release phase, determine what helps you Release and let go of emotions that are no longer serving you. Does deep breathing help you? You can breathe in and imagine peace and contentment flowing in, and breathe out, imagining all that is not serving you mentally, emotionally and physically releasing. Does journaling support your releasing process? Does mindfulness and/or visualization help?

To visualize the Release, you can imagine your emotions on a cloud—drifting away in the sky—or your emotions releasing with the imagery of leaves floating past you on a river. Whatever helps you internalize the experience of letting go, that is what will be most effective for you to do during this phase of Release.

Take time to write down your process and know it may be different for different emotional experiences. Write down what you will do to create a personalized Pause, Reflect and Release. Have these steps nearby so you can access them in times that it may not initially come naturally for you. The rest is practice and time, time and practice. Practice is the only way to integrate the process and make it work for you within your life.  

Did you come up with a creative Pause Reflect and Release? Let me know! I’d love to hear how you are implementing these tools. How are they working for you? Need support? Know that I am here to help support you along your journey to making peace with food as well as with yourself.

How to Manage Emotional Food Cravings Along Your Path to Making Peace with Food

We all have food cravings. You know, that feeling where you just want something sweet, or salty or crunchy, or maybe all three in one! But why do we have these cravings and what can we do about them? Occasional food cravings are normal, however if you struggle with emotional eating, the cravings may be emotionally driven. It is vital to become emotionally aware in order to differentiate what type of craving your are experiencing. This will allow you to make a conscious choice in the moment of a craving. 

A general food craving is a message from your body. It may be trying to send you the message that you are dehydrated, that you have a nutritional deficiency, or that your energy dip may be related to a blood sugar imbalance. These are all really useful messages that are important to notice. When you truly listen to your body, you receive and understand these messages with clarity. A general food craving may also indicate that your daily diet is boring, uninspired, dull in flavor and lacking in a wide range of nutrients. The good news is, you can do something about all of this!

An emotional craving is different. An emotional craving is due to experiencing an emotion and not wanting to be present with it. There is a big difference. If you are experiencing a general food craving, you might be satisfied by having a small amount of what you are craving or a healthier version of what you are craving. With an emotional craving, this is often not the case as the food serves to numb the emotion only temporarily.

An emotional craving is far more difficult to manage and can lead to mindless overeating, weight gain and negative feelings about yourself and your body. The challenge is to begin to allow yourself to experience your emotions and have an alternative behavior aside from eating in order to manage your emotions.

When emotional eating has become deeply engrained as a behavior and your primary go-to coping skill to manage your emotions, it can take a long time to effectively manage and change it. If emotional cravings that lead to emotional eating do not become managed, it can lead to eating disorders, depression, anxiety and a low self-esteem.

Here are some examples of common emotional cravings:

• When you are feeling lonely, food will be your friend and keep you company.

• When you are feeling anxious, food helps to calm you down and temporarily occupy your mind.

• When you are feeling sad, food becomes your comfort.

• When you are feeling bored, food gives you something to do with your time.

• When you are feeling down, food becomes your pleasure.

One strategy to begin to understand what may be driving your food cravings is keeping an emotional cravings journal. This is a place to write down, acknowledge and process your emotions in order to more deeply understand the why underneath and at the root of your craving. Another strategy is having a supportive person to talk to. This may be someone you trust, or someone such as a therapist or health coach to provide support as you work through your emotional cravings. Learning to manage, accept and experience your emotions will help you heal your relationship with food.

As a Wholistic Food Therapist, my focus is working with women who struggle with emotional eating. I have put together a 3-Step Emotional Cravings Protocol that helps to stop the cycle of deeply rooted emotional eating patterns. If you would like a FREE copy, sign up for my newsletter on my website so you can begin managing your emotional food cravings today.

Making peace with food is possible. If you find you would like more support along your path to healing, contact me as I have a number of ways to help support you along your journey to a healthy relationship with food as well as with yourself.

EMDR Therapy Demystified

EMDR is an extremely powerful and effective integrative therapy that uses a specific protocol to reduce emotional and physical distress. The distress may be related to memories, adverse life experiences or traumas that have occurred at any time throughout your life. EMDR allows the opportunity for healing at the deepest roots and helps to increase self-awareness while offering a renewed perspective on the present moment.

Since I began integrating EMDR into my clinical practice, it has transformed my work. I have been especially inspired by the power of EMDR when a person feels a deeper sense of emotional freedom and increased self-acceptance both internally and externally. This authentic self-acceptance and awareness creates a deeper connection to the core of their being as well as a sense of balance and peace within. The process allows you to not only heal, but to grow, change and feel better than imagined.

I can personally attest to the power of EMDR from both sides of the couch. After completing my first EMDR intensive training, I searched for an EMDR therapist as I was amazed by the process. Prior to EMDR therapy, I had debilitating performance anxiety. I realized through the training that I was operating out of old, stuck, negative cognitions and feedback loops in my brain that were related to my past, and were literally holding me back in my life.

I am now able to give presentations without physically shaking, a racing heart, a red face, nausea, intense fear and a near panic attack. It really has been life changing. For those I have had the privilege to support through the EMDR therapy process, I have been able to witness healing over and over again, which is truly inspiring.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. EMDR was developed by Francine Shapiro in 1987 and is administered through an eight-phase process. Here is where it can get technical, making it a little tricky to explain, but I wanted to help to clarify some elements of EMDR therapy as so many people ask me what it’s like during certain parts of the process.

The eye movements create bilateral stimulation of the brain. You work with a specific distressing memory, body sensations and emotions that the memory brings up for you and how the memory makes you feel about yourself. These experiences from the memories may have made you feel, for example, not good enough, like you had to be perfect, or as though you are not in control. These are all examples of negative cognitions which essentially get stuck and create negative feedback loops internally, making it difficult to move forward.

The bilateral stimulation that occurs with the eye movements begins to reprocess those memories in order to desensitize to them. This essentially frees the emotional and physical distress related to the memory. After working through the distressing memories, a positive cognition is installed, creating a healthier outlook on your experience.

I will try to explain this using an example of when I reprocessed a memory related to my performance anxiety. While I was thinking of a distressing memory, I tuned into the uncomfortable emotions it brought up (embarrassed, worried, frustrated) and the uncomfortable body sensations (feeling hot, my heart racing, nausea). I simultaneously brought up how this made me feel about myself, or my negative cognition, which was: I am inadequate. The therapist asked me how distressing this felt on a 0-10 scale.

While sitting with all of that discomfort, I watched the therapist’s fingers go back and forth for about 30 seconds. She asked me to just notice whatever comes up during that time. She would stop, and I would tell her what came up. Then she instructed me to “go with that,” meaning now focus on whatever it was that came up for me. For example, I remembered my hands shaking, my mind going blank and the look on the people’s faces at the very beginning of this particular presentation. While sitting with that experience, she administered the eye movements again. This was repeated several times.

Amazingly, after about ten sets of intense discomfort, I started to feel less discomfort. I even had some positive thoughts come up and felt more at ease. When I would focus on the positive thoughts, more positive thoughts and feelings arose. While my distress did not completely go away in one experience, it did reduce enough to notice an immediate impact.

After several memories that reinforced my negative cognition were worked through, I was able to create a new template for how I view myself. This has increased my self-compassion. Now when I give a presentation, my old baggage from those memories does not show up! It really has been life changing.

This is one example of just a part of the EMDR therapy process. I wanted to offer this glimpse into the process as it can be difficult to understand, but know that there is so much more. If you would like to learn more about the technicality, the science, research and more specifically about the eight phases of EMDR, I invite you visit the website: www.EMDRIA.org.

EMDR therapy has improved the lives of so many who have struggled with memories and experiences far more intense and challenging to cope with than my example. For those who have PTSD, panic attacks, anxiety, depression, eating disorders or anyone who feels as though they are operating out of old, stuck negative beliefs about themselves, EMDR may be a useful and valuable therapeutic technique.

If you are considering EMDR therapy and have any further questions at all, or if you are in the New York City area and would like to schedule a session, feel free to contact me today.