Inner Strength Focus: Growing Temperance to Heal Emotional Eating

We are now halfway through deeply examining the six inner strengths that research points to living a full, happy life. I’ve been talking about how to grow these strengths in relation to the ability to create a healthy relationship with food and with your body. Just as a reminder, the first three were curiosity, vitality and giving and receiving love. The one we will examine today in relation to creating a peaceful relationship with food is temperance. Temperance is an inner resource of acceptance, forgiveness and compassion.

Growing the ability to create greater temperance as an inner strength and positive resource is not a task for the weary. It requires the ability to examine your ego’s desires, to observe your own blind spots and to let go—of a lot—mostly emotions…among other things. This is often much easier in a space of desire than in a space of putting it into practice. Our ego tends to be stubborn and likes to keep its heels dug into its neediness and beliefs about the way things should be. Letting go of some of the stuck emotions that create space for temperance to grow can be a challenge. 

When we apply temperance to an unhealthy relationship with food, it allows more ability to build acceptance that the dieting/restriction mentality that you may have been dancing with for years is damaging. When you build temperance you can forgive yourself for not treating your body in a kind manner—both through what you might have done (or still do it) with food. This could be restriction of certain foods, portions or over-doing-it with food. This also relates to the words and tone you use in your inner dialogue or even out loud about food and your body. Creating space for self-compassion is key and is often the last rung on ladder of temperance that we reach reach. So, let’s dig into this dynamic inner strength and start growing some temperance to reach a higher state of happiness and contentment within and, of course, to begin to make peace with food and with yourself. 

So, first let’s observe a scenario that represents a lack of temperance, where it’s not yet a strength, and then we’ll focus on how to develop, build and grow it over time. Without temperance we often blame others for our suffering, feel like a victim and ruminate on all of our problems over and over and over again. When you apply this to food and body image it’s a constant struggle with worrying about what to eat and then scolding yourself for your choices. Lack of temperance is making negative comments about our own body and even other peoples bodies. It’s holding onto anger and resentment about a number on a scale or a piece of cake (or maybe a few pieces of cake) that got eaten—or that you denied yourself. When we lack temperance we constantly feel like our food choices and our bodies are never going to be good enough and then feel angry about it and we end up over eating or over restricting/excessive exercise to punish ourselves—leading back into a vicious and dangerous cycle where food is the problem, food is the solution… This creates a desire to be “fixed” and we are yet again googling about the latest fad diet, exercise program or hypnosis program for weight loss…

The good news is that when temperance is instilled and nurtured as an inner strength the opposite of the above is possible (and if food/body image is not your vice or struggle you can plug in whatever your personal struggle may be to get the same end result). Acceptance is the foundation of temperance. To grow the ability to accept what is true in this moment without judgment or resistance is a serious challenge. Think about the last time you were sitting there thinking about just how content you are with everything in your life. It may not happen as often as you might like—if it has happened recently for you at all. Creating opportunities for acceptance will begin to create more peace and contentment.

The first place to begin is with offering acceptance to the present moment—just as it is. That means you accept the present moment without rejecting it, without trying to change it, and without judgment. This is mindfulness in action. When you are not in a state of acceptance you are most likely in a state of wishing for something, or in a state of wanting what you right now cannot have. This lack of acceptance for the present moment creates an experience of suffering. To apply this concept to your body image, think about this, if you are wishing for your body to look different that it currently does or for the number on the scale to be different than it is, then you are only perpetuating the experience of suffering in this moment. If you can be present with what is true and not judge it, you can make a choice. If you want something to change, how can you begin to make a series of choices that move you closer towards that change you desire? This can propel you you into action mode rather than victim/stagnancy mode/wishing and not doing anything to change your struggle mode.

Forgiveness and acceptance are interconnected. Forgiveness is the structure of temperance and can be defined like this: forgiveness is releasing the wish that the past could be been any different. Sounds a lot like acceptance, right? Forgiveness is an offering and a freeing so it incorporates acceptance and moves into letting go. When you hold onto resentment towards yourself or others you are holding onto toxic suppressed emotions that only create negative thought patterns. Forgiveness is not necessarily an easy process and generally is not a forced process but a very conscious letting go. This requires patience, knowing that it may take a good bit of time to forgive completely.

Forgiveness is a decision to let go over and over again and it can free you from the toxic emotions. If you are holding onto resentment towards yourself for your patterns with food or body image, you can practice forgiving yourself for eating a certain food. You can forgive yourself for restricting a certain food. You can forgive yourself for not starting today like you said you would, or for not getting in that workout you planned to do. When you forgive yourself you will feel more empowered to create the change you want from a place of self-compassion rather than from a place of self-loathing and resentment. When you operate out of self-compassion you allow yourself to be human and to struggle without punishing yourself for mistakes. This creates inner freedom and peace.

Practicing self-compassion is offering kindness and care towards yourself. You can free your judging thoughts, you can let go of trying to force something or control your food and get in touch with your body in a new, more intuitive way. When you do this, you create a space for understanding your process, your struggles, your low motivation and search for solutions that actually work and are driven out of kindness.

Four actions you can take, starting today to build temperance as an inner strength are:

1.    Practice mindfulness for 5 minutes and notice if you are attempting to judge or control the present moment. Can you align with what is true right now without attempting to change it?

2.    Use the affirmation: “In this moment I accept myself unconditionally” Your mind may try to immediately put conditions on your ability to accept yourself (if I was this size, if I looked this way, if I hadn’t eaten that, if I…) practice letting go of the conditions and continue stating it to yourself until you can just be with it as truth.

3.    Notice how you speak to yourself and practice forgiving yourself for anything you view as a mistake. If you find you are beating yourself up internally, stop, and say to yourself, “I forgive myself for _________________.” Notice how that feels to offer compassion and forgiveness.

4. Take action. Make a choice based on self-compassion, forgiveness and feel temperance growing within as you take action towards living in this space of acceptance.

If you practice these four elements this week, notice the impact and let me know how they work for you. Building the inner strength of temperance is a process, and not meant to be an overnight change. As you continue to grow these inner strengths and use them as internal supports to make peace with food, notice how impactful the way you interact with yourself can be. These strengths represent being and feeling strong from the inside out. When you are strong you demonstrate more resilience and more ability to be self-aware. I’d love to hear about your journey to building these inner strengths within!

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.