Why Your Food Habits Aren't Changing
It's the morning. You're feeling a new resolve that today is the day you're going to have the most joyous and smoothest day with food. You feel calm and connected and feel like you know what you need to do to make new food decisions. Breakfast is a breeze and you continue on with your day. As the hours tick by, you start to notice familiar urges arise. Suddenly, at 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 9:00, or 11:00 pm, as if you had blacked out, you find yourself stewing over how you ate the entire bag of this or a whole carton of that.
No, there is nothing wrong with you. You're not weak or lacking willpower for engaging in familiar food habits. Your patterns with food aren't changing for a reason. Trying to force yourself into change will never work. The food habits you're trying to get rid of have a message for you. Once the message is heard, then the food habit can dissipate all on its own.
Here Are 3 Reasons Your Food Habits Aren't Changing
Expecting Immediate Results
You maybe tried slow, embodied eating once and didn't notice any immediate change and so later in the day you went and grabbed your favorite fill-in-the-blank food and ate as much as you wanted thinking nothing works anyway so why not. Change takes time! Practicing new food habits is going to feel uncomfortable at first. It's probably going to take several weeks and months for the new way you're showing up with food to start to feel comfortable. Take away the expectation that you're going to feel different immediately. As you continue to deepen into relationship with your food and body, you will feel different over time and this difference may be more subtle than you expect.
You're Not Addressing Other Areas Of Your Life
Food cannot fix a lack of communication with those you love. It cannot fix the lack of boundaries you're needing to set. It cannot fix that you're a human being who feels things. Food cannot fix the wounds you're trying to process. Focusing on food to heal your emotional body is like trying to use a hammer when you really need a screwdriver. No matter how many times you use that tool, it just doesn't get the job done. Food can support you on any healing journey to help regulate your blood sugar levels to feel stable in your body. And to change your current food habits, the places of your life you maybe haven't been wanting to attend to need to be addressed. As you feel more heard, seen, respected, and present, then your food habits might shift simply because you’re feeling more emotionally satiated in your life.
Food Has Become Your Only Way Of Regulating
The physiological reactions that occur in your body when you eat naturally support you in feeling safe. If food has become your only way to regulate a dysregulated nervous system, of course, you wouldn't want to give up that food behavior that is supporting you in feeling safe and calm. Other nervous system regulating acts need to come into your day so that food is released from the role of safety provider. As you support your body in feeling calm, grounded, safe, and attuned to in non-food ways, your food habits, which were coming in to support you in feeling relaxed, won't be needed anymore.
Take all the bite-sized baby steps you need on this healing journey. A different relationship with food is possible. If you're ready to take a step forward now, my Intro to Somatic Eating™ mini course is still 50% off. The Somatic Eating™ tools you will learn in this mini course will guide you toward the embodiment needed to hear and interpret your body's messages to never rely on an external diet or expert ever again. If you have any questions, email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime.