Self Sabotage Doesn't Exist. Your Habitual Eating Challenges are Information From Your Body
You wake up Monday morning with every intent that you will NOT engage in your food coping mechanisms. You practice eating breakfast, you're engaging in self care, you eat lunch, and something starts to happen in the afternoon. You begin to feel that familiar tug toward reaching for food. You check in with yourself. You notice you're not physically hungry. You try to distract. You scroll on Instagram. You watch some Netflix. You make yourself dinner and that urge will not go away. It gets to a point where you find yourself at the bottom of a bag, a box, a carton of your favorite self soothing food. You start to beat yourself up. Why do I keep doing this? And the thought pops up in your head, "I need to stop self sabotaging."
The idea of self sabotage means that you're doing something to block your success. I want to reframe that you are NOT getting in your own way when you play out your familiar food coping mechanisms again and again and again.
Some of the reasons that have been stated that self sabotage occurs includes:
Low self-esteem
Cognitive dissonance
Fear or discomfort of change
A need to be in control
Fear of failure
Social or peer pressure
Perfectionism
These same things are also a response to trauma. When something occurred in your life that was too much, too fast, and there wasn't enough coregulation it can affect your self esteem, your thoughts, how quickly your nervous system responds to a potential threat, and increases a need to feel in control to feel safe.
Practice re-defining these behaviors. You're not self sabotaging. When you have the impulse to binge eat, emotionally eat, restrict, and engage in any disordered eating behavior, your body is already in a fight, flight, or freeze response. When you're in the sympathetic nervous system, you're not in the part of your brain where logic and reasoning occur. You're in the part of your brain where you react and engage in actions to try to support you in staying alive.
This means that you're not trying to undermine yourself when these impulses arise. You're trying to feel safe and have enough energy to mobilize and run away from a threat and eating can feel like the answer to do that.
This is because your body remembers.
It remembers when you were a kid left alone and scared and so you went to the kitchen to grab a snack. It remembers the food you would eat hidden in your bedroom while your parents were fighting. It remembers the ice cream shared with friends when your heart felt broken. It remembers every time food was there for you to help you feel calm, connected, seen, heard, held, and safe. These food coping mechanisms make sense. You make sense.
Defining your food habits as self sabotage takes away your opportunity to gain any insight from your behavior as you're then seeing it as wrong or bad or something to be "fixed." Start to see your patterns with food as information on the state of your body and parts of you that are needing to feel safe.
When you feel that familiar urge to reach for food when you're not physically hungry, the practice can be to take a pause.
In that pause here are some questions you can ask yourself:
Where is my nervous system right now? Am I in fight, flight, or freeze?
What sensations and emotions are present in my body?
Does this experience feel familiar? What were times in my life I felt like this?
What part of me wants to reach for food?
What does this part believe it will get from eating food?
What does this part of me need to know?
Taking a pause between reaction and action is where you can start to experience the wisdom in your food impulses. It's a completely natural response that did support you immensely at another time of your life. After you binge eat, emotionally eat, restrict, diet, fill in the blank food behavior, tell yourself, "Wow, my body is so wise to support me in feeling safe. I wonder what I needed to protect myself from." This can bring in self compassion and curiosity which can guide your body into a relaxation response and into your prefrontal cortex where you can feel like you have more choice in what regulating acts you can take next.
One of the pieces of feedback I've received from those who have gone through the Somatic Eating® Program is that they cultivated more compassion and awareness around their food patterns where they felt like even when they engaged in a familiar food coping mechanism they no longer self abandoned afterward. If you're curious about how to get to this place in your relationship with food, the next Somatic Eating® Program starts April 20th. Go to somaticeating.com to join the waitlist. Those on the waitlist will receive a special offer when doors open.