Inner Strength Focus: Giving and Receiving Love to Heal Emotional Eating

The ability to give and receive love is an inner strength possessed by those who are happy and content within their lives. Growing this as an inner strength—the ability to give and receive love in relation to making peace with food—relates to the way you treat food as a metaphor for how you treat yourself and possibly others. Do you control your food? Do you over do it with food? Do you obsess about food? How does this play out with your relationship with others and with yourself? How would you define your relationship with food? If it is a struggle it may point to deeper struggles you are experiencing within, which inevitably may impact how lovable you feel.

Relationships can be complicated while also being deeply life enhancing. When you work on a relationship and allow yourself to fully engage without attempting to control the relationship (and therefore control the love you give OR receive), the relationship will naturally improve with effort and focus. If your relationship with food is challenging where you control it at times and you feel powerless to it at times, it may be useful to, first, take a look at your relationship with yourself and then the relationships with those closest to you.

The first place to build awareness relating to your ability to receive love is to check in with how you receive love from yourself and others. Do you feel loved by others? Do you willingly receive love from others? Do you put conditions on how lovable you feel and therefore conditions on the love you are willing to receive? Does receiving pleasure from food in any way equate to where you receive love in your life? Do you use food to feel love?

You can begin to take inventory as to how you receive love—and then consider where food fits in—as the first step. The second step is to determine where you could let love into your life more completely without attempting to control it. The third step is to determine if you feel truly worthy of receiving love. This can be a tough one, however at our core many of us at times can feel unlovable (and then unconsciously reject or feel suspicious of any love that does come our way). If this is you, then you may be attempting to fill that void in other—possibly unhealthy ways. This is usually the sign of being deeply hurt and not getting your needs met in some way or another in your primary relationships in life. There is no need to place blame here, just know that once you can identify the struggle and origination of these feelings, you can begin to heal. One of the biggest tasks in life is to learn how to love ourselves in a healthy way and essentially meet our own needs so we do not look to others to feel loved out of desperation and fear that we aren’t lovable, but rather to enhance life through the meaningful connections we create.

The fact is that each and every one of us is lovable and capable of rebuilding the ability to feel that way. Once you can build self-awareness you can open yourself to receiving love—first and foremost from yourself. Self-love is a softening towards yourself, being kind with how you dialogue with yourself. Often when we overeat or attempt to control food we might think, “what’s wrong with me that I can’t stick to a plan, diet or exercise regimen?” Try softening this to, “what happened to me today, triggered me, or what emotions am I struggling to feel today?” See the difference? Your inner dialogue can make a tremendous difference in how you feel.

The second place is to accept love where it is freely given rather than attempting to chase it. If it’s just from yourself to begin with, practice accepting that and see how that expands with time. When it comes to giving love, do you attempt to love others through how you are with them or through what you physically give, such as food? There are many ways to offer love to others and show people that you love them, however, if you feel you are giving out love with the hopes of receiving it—that may not be authentic, unconditional love. Rather, that may be the feeling of being unlovable and desperate to feel something. When you authentically give love, it comes without condition or expectation and this may be one of the most challenging tasks of our lifetime—to understand, give, and receive unconditional love.

This week, focus on building awareness with how you interact with food. Do you look to food to fill a void, potentially with an attempt to feel or receive love? Do you give out food to attempt to receive love that you may not feel you deserve without something attached? This can be quite complicated to sort out and a bit overwhelming. Remember, awareness is always where to begin. Without awareness you keep moving yet without change and continue to repeat cycles that are potentially damaging—or at least uncomfortable and certainly not useful. When you become aware you have the opportunity to make a choice. You can choose to give and receive love from a place of authenticity. You can choose to recognize your patterns with food and build awareness that food is not love and that you deserve to love yourself.

Inner Strength Focus: Using Curiosity to Heal Emotional Eating

If you are striving towards greater happiness, inner peace and contentment, developing the inner strength of curiosity will help you approach challenges in life with more ease and awareness. Increasing your knowledge and growing wiser all throughout your lifespan allows you to feel as though you have options and opportunities to shift your perspective to any circumstances.

Here at Wholistic Food Therapy, the primary focus is on supporting and uplifting those who struggle with emotional eating, so the examples given to grow this particular inner strength are directed towards this personal challenge. However, if emotional eating, managing food cravings and body image are not your focus, you can apply the same intention to your own areas of struggle—all challenges we face are usually metaphors for how we approach attempting to manage, control and make sense our internal experiences and our lives.

Applying curiosity to emotional eating is allowing yourself to grow in your knowledge base—and more importantly—becoming wiser surrounding your body, food choices, and judgements. When you struggle with emotional eating, you may feel out of control or powerless to food and therefore need a diet, a plan or something external to create a sense of control and willpower. This is a lie sold to you by the dieting (and now wellness) industry! Being curious about your own body, its specific needs for nutrition, movement and relaxation is all about being mindful and intuitive in how you approach not just what you eat but how you eat it. It is not about what the next best fad exercise program you should try, but about what makes you feel energized, healthy and vital. It is not about finding that perfect diet that is sold to you in a way that makes you believe it will somehow create happiness through weight loss, but really about being curious as to what foods, portions and combinations make you feel your absolute best—physically, emotionally and energetically.

When you are curious about how what you eat makes you feel, you can apply mindful and intuitive eating techniques and grow in your knowledge, awareness and therefore develop body-wisdom. When you are truly guided by your inner wisdom, you no longer question your choices, or live in regret, punishment, deprivation and judgment—nor do you resist what is best for you (aka self-sabotage).

Emotional eating is what happens when food cravings arise from a subconscious attempt to repress emotions. Being curious about what the feeling is about and growing in your knowledge of emotional intelligence can allow you to be truly wise. When you understand why an emotion has arisen, you no longer attempt to avoid it through suppression with food. When you understand why it is there you can make a choice about how to respond to it, rather than eat in an attempt to avoid, soothe or delay the emotional experience. Emotions are valuable information about our experiences, when avoided we avoid our lives.

For this week, if emotional eating is an area that you are working to grow and improve, I recommend following a mindful & intuitive eating practice for at least one meal or snack per day. Allow this to be a moment of being fully present with your food and your body. Make a conscious choice as to a specific meal or snack that you’d like to eat. Approach the opportunity to be curious about your experience with being truly present with your food (and yourself) in the following way:

·      Ask yourself what you want to eat.

·      Ask yourself what you truly are hungry for (emotional suppression or nourishment/something tasty).

·      Ask yourself why you want that particular food.

·      Ask yourself what the food has to offer you.

·      Ask yourself how hungry you are in this moment and allow that to guide your portion.

·      When you are prepared to eat, first notice the aromas and site of the food and notice your reaction internally to this meal or snack. Does it bring you pleasure? Are there feelings coming up for you about the food (not good enough, anxiety about calories, worried about how healthy or unhealthy it is)? If so, try to release these feelings and become mindfully aware in the present moment and let go of any judgmental thoughts.

·      Allow your environment to be as calming as possible without distractions such as TV and cell phones.

·      Tell yourself that you deserve to eat what is nourishing and brings you pleasure.

·      Notice your breath and relax your body.

·      Be grateful for your food.

·      Begin to eat.

·      Chew slowly and thoroughly.

·      Notice the taste.

·      Place the utensils down between bites or food down if eating with your hands.

·      Check in with your full cues.

·      Stop when you are satisfied.

·      Thank yourself for taking this time to be mindful and present with your food.

·      Notice how you are feeling.

·      Take time to journal if it feels as though it would be useful to continue to grow in your knowledge of what is right for you when it comes to food choices, portions, nutrients and mindful eating.

How’d you do? Developing curiosity about your own body’s needs and not what some random dietary theory says is the most valuable way to be truly body-wise and to grow in awareness of your own personal needs for nutrition, movement and relaxation. When you are learning from your own inner wisdom rather from an external source you will have a deeper respect for your body and make choices that serve you—you will choose you rather than choosing a temporary moment of pleasure or restriction.

The Health Benefits of Meditation

The final area of wellness that I will address here that is essential to living a long, healthy, happy life of vitality is developing and using a consistent meditation practice. Just as a reminder, the foundations of physical wellness that I have addressed so far are sleep, nutrition, and exercise/movement. The foundations of mental wellness that I have addressed here are the benefits of a strong social support, core relationships, remaining open-minded and curious, and the willingness to take on challenges and life-long learning.

Meditation offers health benefits that impact mind and body. Meditation addresses the stress response allowing us to access the relaxation response which creates increased mental wellness, creative expansion while releasing uncomfortable and non-useful thoughts and emotions.

Meditation is certainly not something new that I have talked about here! In fact, I’ve mentioned it over and over (as it is one of the primary ways that I keep myself sane) because I’ve see the direct impact that it can have on a variety of struggles for those that I work with, including anxiety, emotional eating, eating disorders, panic attacks, depression and limiting thoughts and beliefs—which directly impact the ability to take action. Meditation is one of the core practices that I have studied both in relation to my yoga studies along with all of the emerging research within the therapy, mental health and wellness world—and all of the benefits really are pretty vast and astounding.

When you are able to add in even just a small amount of meditation daily, you can have a tremendous return on your time investment in the way of health and wellness benefits. As little as five minutes a day can impact stress hormones, neurotransmitter production and circadian rhythms. Twelve minutes a day has shown an even greater impact such as improving telomere length of neurons in the brain (which indicates a younger brain!) increasing focus and concentration and decreased cognitive decline. Not to mention that meditation improves your self-awareness and reduces emotional reactivity which is one of the most valuable ways to improve the quality of your life on a daily basis.

There is often a lot of confusion about meditation. People tell me all the time, “I can’t meditate, I can’t get my mind to be quiet.” This is the primary misconception of meditation. The fact is that meditation is not about turning off your thoughts and sitting in perfect silence. I can tell you from experience that this is not what happens, and definitely not when you are just beginning the practice. Now maybe a long-long time meditator can silence their mind for long periods of time, but most of us have A LOT of thoughts constantly running through our minds. So let’s say that you generally have 100 thoughts a minute, and through a concentration and meditation practice you have 60. That will still feel like A LOT of thoughts, but it is still an improvement! With more practice maybe you’ll have 45 thoughts a minute, and with more 30, but again, that may still feel like a pretty active mind.

The purpose is not to silence your thoughts, the purpose is to distance yourself from the thoughts, to not be so reactive to the constant stream of emotionally provoking thoughts which may only cause stress and tension. In meditation you learn how to witness your thoughts rather than respond to them. This is the true practice, to recognize that you are not your thoughts and that they do not define you. Traditionally meditation is done in a seated posture and connecting with a single point of focus. This single point of focus could be your breath, a word or phrase, an image, a candle flame, or an image you create in your mind such as a sphere of light.

Mindfulness meditation is about being aware of all external and internal potential distractions, such as sounds, body sensations, thoughts and emotions and the mindfulness process invites you to simply notice them. You can even label them for exactly what they are. Here’s an example, as you sit and observe your internal and external space, if you hear the sound of a car, plane, ticking clock or someone talking, you simply label it as a sound rather than letting your mind consider the story of the sound. When you get into the story of the sound you will most likely evoke emotions and then thoughts, such as “ugg, that’s so annoying, I’m trying to meditate and that car keeps honking it’s horn.” That’s how we typically address annoyances in life, however mindfulness invites you see the honking just a sound, no thoughts or emotions necessary. Do you see how this may help improve your response to other potential annoyances in your life?

Meditation is allowing your mind to fully focus on one thing, and when you find you are distracted, you bring your focus back to that single point of awareness—that one thing. It really doesn’t matter so much what your point of focus is so long as you make a consistent effort to maintain it. Not judging your experience or getting involved in your emotions is helpful as well.

The most important element in order to reap the benefits of the practice is to be consistent. Daily is ideal, and even 1-15 minutes is great. If daily does not feel doable quite yet, you might start with 3 days a week and increase as you are ready. I am planning to roll out some support for those interested in a supportive community of beginning/skeptical/interested meditators in the fall! Stay tuned for updates! If you find you’d like some support getting started now, feel free to reach out. No matter how you start, try not to get caught up in the details, it is the experience and practice that matters most, not that you have the right chair, lighting, props or anything else!

If you have been implementing these eight areas of wellness that help support a long, healthy and happy life I’d love to hear how they are working for you!