Hello love,
So today I wanted to talk about emotional eating being a wake up call. I think this is important because we usually think emotional eating is something we need to control.
We need to find the perfect thing to just fix ourselves, not realizing there are these deeper layers. We don’t realize emotional eating is a symptom and on the surface of what is really going on. If we were able to go back and get to the root of this and resolve it, our life would look very different.
The reason I want to share this is that I see this pattern with clients all the time.
I saw this pattern with myself, too.
It’s not that I regret having gone through this journey, but when I look back and see what created it, I almost wish I knew what I know now to not have gone through that.
But of course, everything that I’ve learned, I use with clients, I use with my son, I use in general. It’s helped me become more aware of certain things. So emotional eating is a wake up call. It was mine for sure.
It is calling out to you. It’s trying to get your attention, to wake you up to something so much more than what you think it actually is.
Emotional eating is incessant
A lot of the times, emotional eating becomes so incessant. It’s all we can think about. It crowds out everything in our life. These constant, obsessive thoughts about food, about our body and trying to just manage the stressors of all of this. It becomes overwhelming.
We no longer have capacity to live a life, to expand, to evolve, to grow. This is why I always say emotional eating is the doorway to your evolution. Because if we can get into this pattern and start resolving it, it opens us up to so much more.
It opens up so much more space in our system.
It opens up space in our minds.
It connects us to what we truly desire.
Survival mode
When we’re emotionally eating, we’re in survival mode. When we have obsessive thoughts about food, we’re in survival mode. When we’re constantly criticizing our body we’re in survival mode.
As humans, we’re not meant to be in survival mode – at least not the majority of the time.
2 Modes of the Nervous System
The two main modes of the nervous system are rest and digest and fight or flight. When we’re in survival mode, we’re in fight or flight mode, which is a stress state. It’s only in rest and digest, this calm state, that we’re able to have desires, we’re able to evolve. So we’re not meant to be in fight or flight all the time. We’re supposed to have some of that adrenaline and that stress. If we have a situation come up that’s short lived.
When we have this emotional eating pattern, that’s where we are most of the time. In survival mode. So emotional eating is this wake up call to shift from being in survival to a calmer state.
I know for most of us, and I know this was the case for me, it’s hard to think that you could be in this calm state when most of your life has been spent in survival. Our society is built around these hits of stress and dopamine and we don’t ever know how to be in this calmer state.
It’s kind of lost on us.
When I say emotional eating is this wake up call, it’s that it becomes so incessant that you have no choice but to figure it out.
Most of the solutions sold to you out there are on the surface you’re trading one coping mechanism for another. So you have your emotional eating and you trade it, you try to distract yourself from your distraction, not ever knowing what the true roots are, what’s really going on under the surface.
When I work with clients sadly they’re usually at the end of their rope. They’re wanting to really resolve this pattern. I wish it was a different way and I hopefully it becomes a different way that we have more awareness to know we need help with this.
The Deeper Roots
When we have this emotional eating pattern, it’s important that we realize what’s really going on under the surface is more than what we’re seeing. When we start noticing our emotional eating, it’s already been building up under the surface for many, many years.
When I talk to clients consciously, they can see that they’ve had this pattern since they’re a teenager or maybe even younger and that it has been lingering. But as we dive deeper in the program, it goes even further back than that. So it’s like this snowball under the surface. It’s slowly building, slowly building and then it starts gaining momentum and more momentum and that’s probably the spot you’re at. It’s sort of rolling out of control and we want to stop the snowball, like, stand in front of it and stop it. We have to start really digging in and slowing its momentum, hopefully getting it to level ground and then melting the snowball.
We see this huge snowball, but it started from the smaller ball.
What I do with clients is that we get back into the root, but we also need to deal with that rolling snowball that’s already gaining momentum. We need to get it to level ground. We need to then start un-layering it, maybe melting it down to get to the core.
We work with all of these different aspects inside of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program. We’re looking at the true root of this pattern.
We use food instead of actually moving through what would be needed in order to resolve it. And these emotions, this pattern really starts in childhood when we didn’t have our needs met
Check out the video for more on the roots we need to look at below:
If you’re ready to get to the root of your emotional eating and shift from survival mode to a calmer state then I would love to invite you to find out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program HERE.
It’s a step by step process of reconnecting you back to food, your body and your emotions so that you can open up yourself to being in this thriving space, to not have this noise running your life so that you can start moving forward powerfully. You can evolve, you can expand and have that ease.
If it’s resonating for you and if you’re ready and you’d like to gain more clarity, you can also apply + book in an Emotional Eating Clarity Call HERE. On the call we find out more about you, what your struggles are, what your goals are and if we can support you in the program. You’ll gain a lot of clarity on the call either way, whether you work with us or not.
To waking up,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist specializing in Emotional Eating
