Hello love,
So today I wanted to share with you 3 different areas that you’re triggered into your emotional eating.
I thought this would be be interesting to help you start seeing where you might be triggered into your emotional eating. Part of the reason I want to share this is because when I look at emotional eating, I don’t just blanketly say you’re emotionally eating. To me there is a difference between emotional eating caused by emotions or by a mood imbalance.
Sometimes we’re emotionally eating because of other reasons and sometimes it’s because of true emotions.
When I was on my own emotional eating journey, I had no clue about this discernment. I just felt that I was constantly hungry, I was constantly wanting to eat.
What I’ve found is that emotional eating can be triggered in three different areas. When I work with clients, we work through each of these areas to make sure we’re catching all of the triggers, so that we’re not doing one thing when we should be doing another.
I’m going to share those areas which follow the phases of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program, which is my step by step program that I guide clients through to resolve their emotional eating from the root.
First area of triggers
The first area we’re going to start with that you might be triggered in is around food and nourishment.
This is really interesting because I’ve heard time and time again women blanketly say they’ve been emotionally eating. But it can be because they have been restricting all day. If you’ve been restricting your calories and haven’t been nourishing our body throughout the day, your brain is going to want more calories. It’s going to prompt you to think about food. You’re going to obsess about food. When you do eat food, we’re going to be ravenous.
There is this underlying layer under this of why are you restricting in the first place and not listening to your body’s cue for food? There is a thought loop happening under the surface which can also trigger more shame and that shame can then trigger emotional eating.
But to focus on food – ask yourself are you nourishing yourself enough?
Do you know when we’re truly hungry versus emotionally hungry?
Have you been restricting throughout the day?
I see this time and time again with clients that are not in touch with their body and they’re disconnected. They don’t know when they’re truly hungry and they “think” they know what’s nourishing them, but they don’t have a way of discerning that. This is why True Nourishment an important place to look at.
Second area of triggers
The second area that may be triggering your emotional eating is around your body. Again, these are the more practical things we may be doing that triggers emotional eating.
Are you over exercising at the gym?
Are you pushing past your limit and not resting enough or getting quality sleep?
Are you not having the right movement for your body?
Those things can physically trigger emotional eating in the sense that we’re impacting our hormones, and that then creates an imbalance of hunger, meaning we turn up the hunger cues. So we end up eating more.
On a deeper level there could be the shame around our body driving our behaviours.
SO…
Do you accept your body?
Do you punish yourself at the gym?
Are you telling yourself negative things?
That loop is feeding into the emotions of shame and then that triggers you to emotionally eat.
Third area of triggers
If we look at the last area that we can be triggered into our emotional eating, this is around emotions.
Here it’s really about the emotions that we use food to soothe or numb. For example this could be the shame we feel about binging, about the way our body looks or the day to day uncomfortable emotions that are triggered.
These emotions come up and we don’t know how to deal with them because of the way we’ve been conditioned. We jump into emotional eating because that’s the only way we know how to cope with these emotions. We never learned how to be with these emotions, to move through them, process them, or resolve them at a deeper level.
We just jump to food to soothe.
What we need to do is get into the emotions. What I see with clients is that this pattern is usually coming from childhood and there are deeper unresolved issues that we need to look at. It’s not as scary as it may sound, it’s just really going back there and resolving this trauma (which is on a spectrum of unresolved events) and moving forward in a way that’s going to meet your true needs.
Food is not going to soothe your discomfort. It’s just a bandaid.
Summary
So these are the three areas that I see clients being triggered into their emotional eating.
Each one feeds into the other and there are these underlying elements of disconnection. When we’re disconnected from food, our body and our emotions, we’ve never really learned how to have a healthy relationship with them.
When I work with clients inside of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program, we work through these layers.
Once we start connecting back to ourselves on all these levels the pattern starts dissolving. It’s not that you have to willpower your way through. It’s about resolving and deeply connecting back to yourself and things fall into their rightful place. You start feeling amazing in your body and confident and at ease and free and feeling that way around food as well.
Invitation
If what I’ve shared is resonating with you and you want to get started on your journey you can apply to work with us inside of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program here.
To resolution,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist + Emotional Eating Expert
