How To Eat When Processing Trauma

First, let's start with what is trauma?

Trauma is an emotional response to a distressing event. We cannot compare one person's trauma to another. It depends upon how your body processed that event. If a situation felt overwhelming, where you felt like you had to abandon your body, you have navigated a traumatic situation.

Experiencing trauma can affect the optimal functioning of your gut and alter your gut microbiome. This can affect our relationship with food and our cravings. When processing a traumatic event, two different responses to food can occur. One, you stop eating entirely, where you can experience a high in your body from starving it. Two, you feel drawn to eating comfort foods rich in carbohydrates, sugar, and fat. You're choosing these foods for a reason. They help navigate the trauma response in your body with more ease as they increase certain neurotransmitters in your body like serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins that support you in feeling good. So no judgment here! Reaching for these kinds of foods is supporting you in feeling safe.

The only caveat is…

That the hunger high only lasts so long and once you stop eating your comfort foods and the subsequent neurotransmitter response stabilizes, all of the emotions and bodily response to the trauma is still waiting there to be processed. To create a safe space for the body to digest and assimilate your trauma, food can be utilized as a tool to stabilize your blood sugar levels and support your body in feeling grounded.

The first step here can be to acknowledge when the urge to not eat or reach for comfort food arises. We cannot change what we're not aware of so you can slow down and begin to notice what it feels like in your body when these food reaction urges arise. Those sensations will start to be your red flag when your body is needing your attention.

Next, get curious what you're hoping to receive from engaging in that food behavior. If you're looking to feel calm, soothed, peaceful, relaxed, think of the last time you engaged in this food behavior. Did you feel the way you wanted to feel 3, 4, 5, 6 hours later?

If not, explore what new food habits you want to experiment with. If you have the urge to not eat anything, this might be making a different decision and choosing to eat what supports you in feeling grounded and embodied over time. Instead of choosing your go to comfort foods, you might experiment with choosing a different food that you know supports you in feeling calm in the moment and long term as well. This can include making yourself a quality balanced meal or snack with all of your macronutrients of protein, fats, and carbs which can stabilize your blood sugar levels making it easier to flow with whatever is arising.

You can also ask yourself is what you're thinking of eating a whole food? A whole food is anything that you could pull from the earth, pick from a tree, is lovingly cared for and tended to, and is naturally occurring and created. We want to make it as easy on your body as possible to digest your physical nourishment so that you feel connected and safe to attend to your emotional hungers.

By consciously choosing different foods and different food behaviors, this will create a secure inner environment so that you know, no matter what trauma you're healing from, you can come back to this very moment and feel safe in this body right here and right now.

As a side note, you cannot get this wrong. Whatever you decide was the best decision you could make in that moment. So this journey of healing trauma and also choosing different food behaviors you get to take one bite sized step at a time and trust you're exactly where you're meant to be on this healing journey.