Why Emotional Eating Is Not The Problem
You may follow a lot of individuals trying to teach you how to stop your "emotional eating." I want to offer a different perspective on "emotional eating."
Choosing food to emotionally self soothe is showing up for a reason.
If we don't pay attention to what our body is trying to tell us, then our body is going to take over at some point to try and speak to us in louder ways. Think of how powerful your emotional eating or binge eating experiences are! What a potent way for your body to get your attention.
Let's reframe that choosing food for emotional hunger reasons is not "wrong" or "bad." It is your body's way of communicating to you that it needs your attention. Our body can't speak with words and so this is the way it talks to you through cravings and urges and impulses.
Your current relationship with food might look something like this:
A piece of clothing didn’t fit, turn to food. Feeling rejected, restrict your eating for a while ultimately leading to a binge later. Feeling stressed, turn to food. Felt like you didn’t say the “right” thing, restrict your eating, leading to a subsequent binge later. It is a ping pong match where no one ever wins. Here's the thing though, it is never really about the food.
Continuing to focus on your emotional eating or binge eating patterns is a distraction from doing the deeper healing work your body is calling you to do. These urges and impulses are guiding you and revealing to you what beliefs and perceptions your body may be holding onto that are no longer serving you with the person you are today or who you're trying to transform into. In these scenarios, it was the unmet feelings and desires that actually need to be attended to. The feelings of fear of not being loved, the desires to feel like you belong, a wanting to feel seen and confident and self-assured. Eating food may support with navigating these needs in the moment but those needs will still be there after the eating is complete.
Your emotional eating is not the "problem" to keep focusing on. The more you continue to focus on the eating behavior, the less those underlying reasons driving the behavior get to be processed, digested, and released from your body. It is these more emotionally intense places that your body is desiring you to assimilate so that it can shift out of fight or flight response and into relaxation.
The next time you feel that urge to reach for food to emotionally self soothe here are steps you can explore taking:
1. Pause. Notice your habitual reaction making this food behavior "wrong," trying to fight it, or wanting it to go away.
2. Acceptance. Instead of continuing to do battle with this urge, embrace it. Thank your body for giving you this urge to try to get your attention.
3. Get Curious. Explore what foods you want to eat and what these foods might be protecting you from.
4. Eat. Eat the food you're desiring to eat. When you put the power in you and less in your food. This behavior becomes less interesting. You may start to notice that as you start to allow this behavior that it is not actually satiating your emotional hungers.
Over time, you may want to start experimenting with other emotionally satiating behaviors that have nothing to do with food. Give yourself time though to allow yourself to choose food to emotionally self soothe and observe if it actually gave you the love, acceptance, calm, peace, and connection that you wanted. Once you cultivate that awareness that your body is not getting what it needs from food when it comes to your emotional hungers there's no turning back. You cannot unknow that. You can mentally understand this and it's important this is felt on a bodily level. Building your body awareness is key to changing this behavior. Right now, it may be your mind that is making these food decisions so the food decisions need to start coming from your body knowing that emotional eating is not a problem but it will also not give you what you need.
The healing around this relationship with food can occur when we allow it to happen and learn from those eating experiences. The transformation comes when we get into our body and hear what it is trying to tell us. Emotional Eating is not the problem. It is a surface level symptom asking you to come a little closer, dive a little deeper, and explore what is underneath. I'm here for you on this adventure into the unknown.