Hello love,
I want to share with you more about what’s really holding you back from resolving your emotional eating that you’re not aware of.
Let’s jump right in….
Block #1
As I’ve been working with clients over the years, the main thing that I see preventing them from moving forward is to commit to themselves.
Let’s say you found a solution and you’re trying it. So this could be all of the magic bullet solutions and all of the things you’re trying. It’s hard to commit to yourself because something keeps coming up to prevent you from doing that.
There’s a lot of resistance preventing commitment.
So the number one thing holding you back from resolving your emotional eating, might not be that you don’t have the right plan in front of you or system. It’s that this resistance is coming up blocking your commitment.
It could be the right way for you to eat, or you might be trying to implement ways of eating that are beneficial to you, but you’re missing the mark. The biggest thing I see is being able to commit and to move through that resistance.
This is something that we’re not taught. Most of the time in our society, what we see is that we need to willpower through, we need to push past these limits because the way we’re set up in our society is to fight against ourselves. We don’t actually understand why we have this resistance to doing something in a new way and need to resolve it.
Block #2
That brings me to my second point, which is around not really understanding the emotional eating pattern.
We think we just have to control food, we have to control our body, and this is how we’re going to resolve our emotional eating.
On the surface it looks like “I eat too much, I’m hungry all the time, my body is changing, I don’t feel comfortable, I’m obsessing about food”. So we’re seeing everything on the surface and really what’s happening is that emotional eating is like an iceberg.
When you look at it on the surface, we see all these things going wrong. We’re eating too much, we’re trying all the things to combat the eating, combat the thoughts, combat the change in our body. It seems like a simple equation, A+ B = C.
The math seems so easy. But if this is an iceberg, we need to be aware of what is under the surface. There are all of these other things happening and it’s not simple math. It’s more like algebra or calculus. We need to look at the bigger picture.
Without being taught this, we’re left to put the pieces together and figure it out. It seems easy on the surface because when we look at the people who have a healthy relationship to food, their body and emotions it looks like A + B = C. Because under the surface they don’t have this other stuff going on. Everything is in alignment so they can do the simple actions and get the results they want.
Whereas someone with this emotional eating pattern, there’s a lot of things under the surface going on.
Emotional Eating is a Coping Mechanism
Emotional eating is a coping mechanism. It’s where we use food to soothe ourselves whenever any discomfort or distress comes up. It’s a pattern we created to survive. It usually happens when we’re very young because certain needs of ours weren’t met and when we’re left with discomfort. As a human, we need to feel okay and good.
When you eat food it releases endorphins. So it feels good and it’s pleasurable to eat. Food also connects in with love, we are fed and kept close when we were babies. When we start understanding this pattern and how it is formed, we start seeing how to truly resolve it.
Block #3
The third thing that I’m going to mention that’s holding us back from resolving this pattern is having all of the pieces in a program to help us move forward.
When I was on my own emotional eating journey and like all the clients that come to me, there’s always a missing piece. You’re trying everything. You think, I’ve got the food piece and I’m working out my body and maybe I have some stuff from childhood and I’m working in therapy. But those are still on the surface.
I’m not taking away from the importance of any of those areas. If everything under the surface is aligned and you don’t have resistance, you can take a simple strategy and implement it.
But if you can’t, there’s all this resistance, which is usually subconscious. This means we are not aware of it or just go along with it not knowing why. That’s the majority of us, we have this resistance. We have all of these limiting beliefs that we inherit from our parents, family and from society. These beliefs don’t align us to who we are.
I get it. I was there grasping for every solution, every diet, trying to fit into this box to be acceptable and be loved. We’re told if we look a certain way, if we are a certain way, then we’re going to be acceptable and loved.
We learned this when we were very young. Our parents, unless they were aware, try to mold us into this box or we think if we fit into a certain box they will approve of us. So we never fully know who we are because we’re always trying to please. That’s how we develop these coping patterns and strategies because we weren’t seen, heard or validated in our experience and thought something was wrong with us.
Creating Change
Of course our parents weren’t taught this, and so the cycle repeats. At some point for me, I started to find more information and do different work. I knew I didn’t want this for myself or my future children (I didn’t have my son yet). I wanted to create change. I could see people had the relationship to food and their body that I desired.
I knew it was possible for me.
I’m going to share with you the areas that I see that we need to help us move through this pattern. These are the areas that the Emotional Eating Evolution Program are built around. I’s built around these areas because it’s important to have all these pieces in place to resolve your emotional eating.
First Area
I’m going to start with the first area around True nourishment and strategic digestion because emotional eating is almost like this layered cake. We start off with creating the coping mechanism, which creates an unhealthy relationship to food and our body.
We optimize and connect you back to your body and how to nourish yourself. There are strategies around digestion because digestion plays such an important role in our mood and it can be a trigger to emotional eating. If we’re in the diet mentality, that’s going to also trigger a lot of obsessive thoughts because we’re restricting and our body needs certain calories and nutrients. That turns on this obsession with food. So that tells me that your body is not getting the true nourishment it needs and you’re pushing it into more emotional eating and binging.
Here we also discern True from Emotional hunger tangibly to connect more and more with our body. Once we are nourishing ourselves, we can see where the triggers are, where we’re using food to cope way rather than for truly nourishing our body.
Second Area
The second area is around body acceptance because this goes hand in hand with the emotional eating pattern. We start criticizing our bodies and trying to fit it into a certain box to get that love and that acceptance. Then when we can’t reach that goal, or we don’t follow through that turns on the critical thoughts. The shame, criticism and punishing chatter triggers the emotional eating pattern.
Then we cope with food to feel better and we’re in the cycle. The way to move through and resolve this trigger is to start connecting back to our body in terms of its rhythms, its needs for rest and movement and having body acceptance.
It also realizing in a concrete way that our worth is not in our body.
Third Area
The third area is around the emotions under the emotional eating pattern. The actual unresolved issues and traumas that created this pattern. In the program we move through this on a somatic level, because that’s where we hold trauma. This is how we start resolving this pattern at the deepest root.
This area is more about that actual event(s) that created this pattern. We meet our true needs as we resolve the event and no longer need food as a bandaid. Once we resolve it we can move forward powerfully because it is no longer running the show.
We’re not bypassing, we’re doing that deeper work. This is not about going through the trauma/unresolved issue again, but rather resolving it at this deeper level. When we do things like talk therapy, we’re just in our mind, we’re not accessing the trauma which is stored in our body.
That’s what makes this process so powerful.
A solution that addresses all layers of emotional eating
Those are the three main areas and so that’s what’s really missing from a comprehensive program to help you move through your emotional eating pattern.
When I work with clients, they’re given the step by step methodology, support, guidance, accountability and a container so they can go deeper, so that they’re moving through the resistance holding them back.
They’re understanding their pattern on a deep level. When we start understanding things and it becomes conscious to us, it’s hard to go backwards because we start seeing clearly what we’re doing. We’re not taken over by the pattern.
Invitation
If what I’m sharing is resonating and you feel like you’re ready to commit to yourself with a program that’s going to help you move through your resistance so you can stay committed to your goals then I’d like to invite you to find out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution program HERE.
To moving forward powerfully,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist specializing in Emotional Eating
