3 New Messages To Feed Your Body This Holiday Season To Decrease Emotional Eating

What have you connected with the holiday season? Has this time of year been connected with an increase in stress, financial concerns, family wounds, loneliness or perhaps connection, gratitude, giving, traditions, and rituals? When the holiday you celebrate starts to get closer and closer, how do you feel in your body? As New Year's Day approaches what comes up for you?

There has been a lot of societal norms created around the holiday season. One of those can be the holidays is a time where you spend it with family. Yet, if being in the presence of your parents or siblings has felt frustrating, dysregulating, and sad, this is also a time of year that you may find yourself reaching for food to emotionally self soothe more and more.

This isn't about holiday food being "addictive" or losing your willpower during these holiday months. This is about how you have learned to navigate a body that feels threatened and unsafe. That's right. Being around your family can send your body into a fight or flight response where your behaviors around food are there trying to support you in feeling safe, grounded, and regulated to survive the external perceived threat.

So today, I wanted to offer 3 reminders you can digest and assimilate to navigate this holiday season perhaps in a new way.

1. It is not your responsibility to manage someone else's emotions or reactions

You're a growing, evolving, changing human being. You're allowed to show up differently from year to year. You're allowed to set boundaries. You're allowed to ask for what you need. You changing may bring up a lot of emotions and reactions from your family. You showing up differently can be a mirror back to them and what they are working through in their own life and that they too may need to change if they're going to try to accommodate you and who you are now.

If that person is not yet ready to change, look at themselves, and try to show up differently for you then they might react in ways that try to get you to show up in the ways they are accustomed to. Their reaction has nothing to do with you and more to do with what is emotionally coming up for them. It is not your job or responsibility to fix what is showing up for them or change yourself to accommodate their discomfort.

2. Just because your family is having a difficult time showing up for you doesn't mean you're difficult to show up for or too sensitive

Your family of origin can be the first experience of belonging. If you never felt like you fit in with your family, it can translate in your young mind as not fitting in within the world. Your family saying things like, "you're too much, you're always so difficult, I don't understand you, stop being so sensitive" is a reflection of themselves and that they have a hard time knowing how to show up for your unique self.

You are not too difficult. You are not too sensitive. You are not too much. There are people in this world who will be able to see you, hold space for you, and appreciate you as you are. Just because your family of origin responds this way to you doesn't mean it is a truth or a fact.

3. No matter how much food you do or do not eat, grief will still be there and needs to be welcomed

I remember one particular Thanksgiving in my early 20's eating almost a whole loaf of pumpkin bread as fast as possible because the emotions that were present felt too much, too big, too giant of a wave to surf. Yet after eating, the emotions were still there just subtly numbed out from the sensations of being overly full. This holiday season you may be around or in communication with family more. If you have felt unseen, misunderstood, and underappreciated in your family of origin, grief will be alongside you. No matter how much food you do or do not eat, grief will still be there.

Food can absolutely be your friend through this experience helping you to feel safe and regulated, and the grief will need to be sat with and welcomed to the table. When grief gets to be in the passenger seat during the holiday season, you step out of fighting what wants your attention and presence. Grief gets to be along for the ride while you're behind the steering wheel deciding what food behaviors are going to support you in feeling the acceptance and unconditional love you desire.

You have always deserved to feel loved, seen, heard, accepted, and understood. You're going to be making the best Food Decisions you can this holiday season. Sometimes choosing to eat a food to self regulate will be the optimal choice and other times you may actively choose to self regulate in other ways. Be gentle with yourself and please know you're not alone in what you're experiencing.

Through the rest of this holiday season into the New Year, my Intro to Somatic Eating™ mini course is back on sale for 50% off until midnight on January 1st. If you would like more tools in your eating toolbox, this mini course will offer you three new Somatic Eating™ tools to support you with creating the empowered and embodied relationship with food you have been wanting. You can find the link to the Intro to Somatic Eating™ mini course in the show notes and as always if you have any questions, email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime.