How Your Focus on Food and Body is Distracting You

Do you remember the moment where you realized that potentially maybe something needed to change in how you were showing up for your body and your food?

Mine was when I was in Undergrad…

I had pulled an allnighter completing my Costuming final. For those of you who don't know, my background is actually in theater. I'll share more on this in the future. I had taken all of my hardest classes in the same semester. I was so stressed out and judging myself constantly that I was hardly eating. Walking into the final I felt like I was about to have a heart attack from lack of sleep, high stress levels, and undernourishing my body. When I left that final, I was so scared for my life, I went home and literally ate all day long. That was the day that woke me up and I said no more. Something has got to change. This was not what my life was meant for.

That was one moment though. There were a million little moments before that one though that led to that day and that kind of relationship with my food and body. This is why when your focus on food and body peaks this is your red flag that some emotion or belief or perception is coming up that needs your attention. It can feel a lot easier to focus on what we're eating and what we look like.

Our society and what you might have been taught by family and friends is that there is this perceived idea that these things are under our control. There are so many moments that we might have felt out of control, disempowered, unseen, and unheard that a focus on food and body actually on some level feels safer to focus on than the deep pain, sadness, and grief we are still trying to process from past events. This is how when we start over analyzing what, when, and how we are eating and moving we are protecting ourselves from attending to the intense emotions showing up.

If someone comes to me with a broken relationship with their food and body, I typically start working with someone's relationship with their emotions first. What I have seen over and over again is that when we dive into our deeper emotional healing, our relationship with food naturally shifts and changes as we release food of the responsbility to satiate our emotional hungers.

So how do you discover what you might be distracting yourself from?

First, write a list of all the emotional hungers you have in your life. This might be connection, understanding, communication, love, acceptance, and so on.

Next, put this list up on your fridge.

Every time you go to reach for food in between your meals, slow down and ask yourself are you truly physically hungry in that moment. If so, great go eat!

If you do not sense physical hunger, reference this list on your fridge and ask yourself, what emotional hunger might be present.

If you notice a desire for something like connection, you might be feeling lonely and food is coming in as a way to support you in navigating the sensations of lonliness.

Identifying what your emotionally hungering for gives you the opportunity to pause and reflect on what is going to be most supportive to satiate that emotional hunger.

I want to add a side note that sometimes you may still choose to eat to satisfy the emotional hunger you have identified and that is alright too. You get to trust that whatever decision you ever make was the best decision for you at that moment.

If you're ever looking for more support around what your focus on food and body might be distracting you from and how to identify the difference between emotional and physical hungers in your body, email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime! Book a free 20 minute Connect Call with me today.