Decrease Emotional Eating by Effectively Self Regulating with your Meals

When I was in the thick of my emotional eating and binge eating patterns, food was often used to check out instead of check in.

I would even wait days to check in with myself until I saw my therapist and then burst into tears expressing everything my body had been holding onto and then the pattern would repeat where all those emotions would build inside my body leading up to a binge and a release only at one point in time where I felt safe enough to let go.

If this pattern sounds familiar to you, the work here is to start to use regular meal times as opportunities to check in with yourself. There needs to be more time incorporated into your day where you connect with your body, check in with what's there, and give it space to be expressed.

The more you check in with yourself throughout a day, you're giving yourself the opportunity to name what emotions are present and make decisions based on your morals and values as a human being. It's when all of those emotions are bottled up that our emotions can become more dysregulating over time by our reaction to them. Knowing that you can surf any emotion that arises is crucial for self regulation so that when they start to feel more intense in your body your first automatic response is to check in instead of checking out with food. Showing up for your emotions and sensations is the gateway to changing your relationship with food.

So how do you do this?

Since you need to eat regularly throughout the day, you can use meals as the places in your day that you actively check in with yourself.

First,

you need to create something that reminds you to pause before you start eating. This might be a red sticky note you put somewhere, a reminder on your phone, a hair tie on your wrist, a literal sign that tells you to stop wherever you tend to eat. What pausing does is it takes you out of automatic pilot mode. If your automatic pilot mode is living in a sympathetic nervous system response, then you need to start incorporating a lot more pauses in your day to check in, practice regulating acts, and show your body that it's safe to consistently guide your nervous system into a parasympathetic nervous system response.

Next,

after you have paused find a body part that feels completely neutral to attend to. Having this safe place to reference in your body is going to be a resource as you begin to check in with yourself to see what's there.

Then,

slowly check in with yourself. You might first name what emotions are present. You might describe where that emotion shows up in your body. You could explore if there is a shape or image or color that could encapulate what you're feeling. Then, you can back off of what you're noticing and check back in with that neutral part of your body. One goal here is to stay inside your window of tolerance while giving yourself space to feel emotions that maybe haven't been felt for awhile because food has been coming in as a rescuer from that feeling. So you can give yourself a small moment to check in and then attend to something else. Then you might go back into it again and then back off.

Once you have identified what is present, you can explore how you want to move that emotion through your system. This could be through singing, shaking, wiggling, patting your body down from head to toe. All of these acts will stimulate your vagus nerve and put you into a parasympathetic nervous system response.

You can engage in this process before or after eating and you might notice feeling differently in your body as you start to eat or as your body continues to digest. We eat and digest most easily in a relaxation response and the act of checking in and self regulating can facilitate stronger digestion and feeling more at ease and connected in your body.

This will be a practice you can keep on practicing. Self regulation is like a muscle that gets stronger with time the more that you practice it the less food will be needed to self soothe as your ability to self regulate and stay connected to your body grows.

I have some very exciting news!

Satiated Podcast is on Patreon. You can now join the Satiated Podcast Membership. For only $19 a month, you will receive opportunities to connect with others listening to the podcast, receive content I will only post on Patreon, and be able to attend monthly live calls to ask questions you have about anything discussed here. If you sign up in the next two weeks, you will also receive the opportunity to have a session with me that will go live on the podcast. You can join the Satiated Podcast Membership here and can't wait to see you over there!