Hello love,
I wanted to share a bit more on how emotional eating pattern plays into your boundaries. Something that I notice with most of my clients is that they tend to be people pleasers. They tend to feel intimidated by putting up boundaries, and this triggers them into emotional eating and soothing with food.
So why do these two things go together?
If you’ve been on this emotional eating journey, you’ve been trying the diets, the exercise, the pills, surgeries, etc. All in an effort to try to “fix yourself” but you are still stuck. There’s so much more to this pattern. It’s multilayered and that there are so many other things under the surface that’s going on.
I want to share with you why boundaries, or maybe lack of boundaries seem to go together with this emotional eating pattern.
Emotional eating is when we use food to soothe ourselves from any discomfort or uncomfortable emotions. When we’re people pleasers that means is that we do things that we don’t necessarily want to do because we think it’s being nice. We’re being a good person. We have these set of behaviors that we think a good person would do.
It doesn’t mean it’s authentic to us. We feel obligated to do that. When we go against our deeper self and knowing what happens is that that creates an unrest inside of us. Part of us knows this isn’t right for us. This isn’t authentic.
There’s this discomfort that comes up when we’re on the surface doing the “nice thing”.
That discomfort is coming up to tell us that most likely a boundary is being crossed. Something internally is not correct for us, but we still do it anyways because we think that’s what we “should” be doing.
This discomfort, as it comes up, what do we do?
We go to food to soothe ourselves. So we keep acting out the good person role and we keep people pleasing and we keep doing the right thing. So there’s this layer, tick, tick, tick. This is a good person. And we keep adhering to that.
This discomfort that’s coming up may be telling us this isn’t right for us, that inner knowing, we keep stuffing it down with food. We keep pushing it down because we don’t know how to listen to it. We think something’s wrong with feeling uncomfortable, and so we don’t know what to do with it. We eat the food, we soothe, we go into that automatic pattern, maybe not even realizing we’re feeling that discomfort. We’re so used to being that “good person” and doing the right things that we don’t know how to slow down and feel that discomfort.
All we see is this emotional eating on the surface. The more out of control your emotional eating is, the more you’re feeling discomfort and unease with the way you’re being with your life. You keep using food, instead of looking at the deeper issue of what’s going on. That’s how emotional eating and boundaries and people pleasing are interconnected.
Of course, there are other layers to the emotional eating pattern that might even play into this.
For example: if you’re a people pleaser, you’re not aware of your own boundaries, you might not be nourishing yourself well throughout the day or taking breaks. You won’t be treating your body correctly because you’re pushing past your limits in other areas of your life. You will most likely not take the actions you need to care for yourself. Because you’re putting everyone else first, you’re putting everyone else’s needs first.
What do I do?
I know this can be a hard place to be in because if you’ve been living this way for so long, you might think, what do I do now? Do I just completely overhaul my life? And it’s not about that. It’s about getting in touch with you first before you make any external decisions. It’s about getting to the root of it.
It might be something simple that you need to shift and it opens you up to a new way of being.
This is what happens with clients when they come into the program. We do the deeper work. This deeper work is transformational. While it is profound it doesn’t have to be this big scary thing. It actually can be very simple.
We just need the right tools and processes and strategies to really move through it. But it can be simple, and it’s taking that next step.
Of course, when you’re in a program, you have support to help you move forward and take action steps that might be difficult or you haven’t done before. Because you’re so used to being in this role of putting everyone else before you, of not having boundaries. It’s scary to do that because you weren’t modelled that. You weren’t given permission to have that.
Why are you a people pleaser?
There’s a reason you’re in this role of people pleaser.
There’s a reason you’re in this role of not having boundaries because this is how you learned to survive. A byproduct of that is feeling that internal discomfort. You had to be a certain way, and what you were feeling, you weren’t accepted for.
Is it really you? Well, no, not necessarily. It’s trying to protect you and help you survive. It’s a survival part of you and the deeper part of you feels uncomfortable. You put food on top of it to cope and not feel the discomfort.
What we need to do is get in touch with these layers of you, these parts of you, and really start meeting those deeper needs. Then giving them new solutions and new ways forward.
The part of you that’s in charge right now, thinks you have to be a certain person. It’s limited in the way it views the world.
The Doorway
So emotional eating is this doorway to your evolution for this reason. It’s to open you up to a new way of being, because the way you’ve been doing things, it’s not working. When clients work with me inside of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program, there is this shift of creating boundaries and creating space so that they can care for themselves. They can hear themselves, they can connect with themselves on this deeper level so that they can move forward more powerfully.
You’re here for a reason. You don’t know how to set boundaries that feel aligned and good and empowered because you feel badly when you do. Then you emotionally eat. When you clear this pattern you get in touch with your true needs.
You start seeing that you are allowed to have needs. You are meant to have needs. You’re meant to take up space.
You’re meant to take care of yourself. You didn’t come here to be a martyr. That’s where you start creating this new way forward. That’s how you start creating that around you with the people you have with your situations in life. That’s how you feel more at ease in your life because you’re able to create those boundaries.
Of course, at first it’s not the easiest thing because it’s a new way of being. It’s going to be challenging, it’s going to be scary. When you have support and accountability and someone who’s been through it and can guide you through it, then you’re able to take that next step a lot quicker with a lot more ease, with a lot more confidence. Then you build that internally because you see it’s okay to take the next step. You see how you feel when you break through that barrier.
We do this inside of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program by connecting you to food, your body and your emotions. There’s a step by step process, there’s guidance, there’s weekly office hours to help you move through resistance as well as the deeper somatic meditations for those deep rooted blocks and those deep rooted unresolved situations that we need to move through so that you can create momentum and move forward.
Invitation: If you’re ready to resolve this pattern and you want more clarity, you can book in an Emotional Eating Clarity call. 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 and if we’d be a good fit to work together.
To authentic boundaries,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist specializing in Emotional Eating
