Grieving The Loss of a Food Habit

In my podcast and blog, I’m striving to break things down into manageable bite-sized action steps. I found on my journey of cultivating a more peaceful and accepting relationship with food and body that there were a lot of different guidance and suggestions. The bombardment of suggestions often left me with more questions of where do I begin and what steps do I need to take?

So what I’m sharing here has been a decade worth of work on myself and what I have noticed has been effective with my clients. What I have seen is that if we try to change too much too fast we will, at some point in time, find ourselves engaging in familiar habits and patterns that we know don’t support us any longer simply because they’re comfortable and they are what is known. We have to approach change with a baby step mentality of breaking things down into bite-size pieces so that change is happening so slowly that we only realize how much has transformed when we reflect back.

This means that change around our relationship with our food and body needs to happen much much more slowly than we may want and we have to challenge how quickly we need our wants and desires to be satiated. The journey of healing gets to be just as satiating as reaching our goals.

Today I’d like to tell you a story of what actively changing a food pattern can look and feel like.

When I was going through graduate school it was probably one of the more intense times of my life. I describe my graduate school experience receiving my Masters Degree in Body Psychotherapy as ripping my heart out of my chest and making me look at it so that I could do the same for others. All the wounds that my body was holding onto needed to be processed, digested, assimilated, and released. At times though, this healing process felt too intense. I didn’t know how to always be with what was showing up. So I would turn to food! As so so many of us do.

I met my now husband the summer before my second year of graduate school. Within the first few weeks of us dating he was dropping me off at my apartment one night and I revealed that I was feeling a lot of different emotions and that I just wanted to eat a jar of almond butter. And yes, I literally meant a whole jar of almond butter. He looked at me with compassionate understanding and said, "what would happen if you didn’t reach for the almond butter jar?" At that time I had been so fused to that behavior. That food was the only answer I had as I was processing deep wounds. I needed to be reminded that I had a choice and that just because this urge showed up didn't mean I needed to act on it. And, that is what my husband offered me that night. A gentle reminder to step into my power.

Before he left he offered to me, "you could brush your teeth, get in bed, read a book, and just go to sleep early."

After he left, I stood in the middle of my living room. I had a choice. I could enact the habitual pattern I had already been doing to self soothe with food, which, to be honest, was not really giving me what I desired of feeling peaceful, understood, relaxed, or calm. Or I could do exactly what he said and I could just go to bed.

This is how I was feeling in my body in that moment:

I felt pressure in my chest

My head felt tight

My breath was shallow

I felt frozen where I was standing

The thought of not reaching for the almond butter felt so intense. I realized at that moment that it felt more comfortable to feel the discomfort of feeling full from eating than the discomfort of the pain of what I was trying to process.

So I decided to try something new and I brushed my teeth and I got into bed and I turned off the lights and I went to sleep. I remembered waking up in the morning feeling a mixture of new emotions. I felt relieved that I gave myself the opportunity to choose something different and not reach for food. I felt curious about how to keep up this new habit I was creating. I felt an immense amount of grief. I had a realization that no matter how many times I could reach for food for emotional satiation it would never ever provide me with what I was looking for.

I continued to process this grief for weeks after this event, which supported me in making new food choices again and again. You see in the process of changing our patterns we sometimes have to grieve as we say goodbye to habits that we realize will no longer support us in cultivating the life we desire to live. It can feel so painful and disappointing to come face to face with a pattern we have chosen to engage in and come to terms that it will not give us what we want. So in the process of changing our relationship with food sometimes we need to cry, we need to scream, we need to throw a tantrum. You can explore what you need to do to grieve for a habit that you know on some level you can no longer interact with because it is not creating the life that you want to be living.

The baby steps here can be:

1. Notice when you're faced with a decision

2. Reflect on your choices

3. Observe how each choice feels in your body

4. Remind yourself of your goals and dreams for your life

5. Choose whatever action supports you in moving closer to yourself not further away

6. Trust that whatever decision you made was the best choice for that moment

You might continue to self soothe with food from time to time. Sometimes that’s just going to happen and that’s OK. The difference is that it will no longer be a habituated pattern in your life. When it happens, it will be your opportunity to slow down, journal, self reflect, and explore what are the deeper emotional hungers wanting to be satiated. You can use these incidences as opportunities to grow and to continue to show up for yourself on an even deeper level.