Hello love,
Today I want to talk to you about that invisible layer, that sort of film that’s holding you back from feeling at ease in your body and around food. It’s the key to resolving your emotional eating.
I wanted to talk about this because we all walk around when we emotionally eat feeling like we’re living life with this layer on us. Sometimes it might feel like there’s a layer physically, if we have health issues, weight gain or inflammation. Or we feel like there’s this mental barrier like limiting beliefs holding us back from fully being who we are.
It’s like we’re almost moving through life with the brakes on. This is a feeling that’s really prevalent among the women that I work with.
It was something that I felt as well. If you’re someone that wants to go after your goals, dreams and ambitions, you really feel this layer. It’s like you’re trying to take a step forward, and you get pulled back.
The Layer
So when we’re emotional eaters, it’s like we have this layer, this goo covering us. I remember back to my big rock bottom and thinking that if I just move from Toronto to Korea, if I changed jobs from being an Analytical Chemist to Teaching, if I just blow up my life, maybe things would change.
I could get rid of this layer, this goo. I could finally move forward. But it just just threw me back into my emotional eating even more.
It was like every step I was taking in my life, it felt like I had this layer of just feeling not good in my body which translated to discomfort in my life.
It was so thick, it was so tangible. I physically felt it, and I could see it showing up in my life. When we emotionally eat, that’s how we’re living life. We’re living life with this layer, this filter. Because if we’re not moving through our emotional eating, it means we’re out of touch with food, our body, and our emotions.
We’re disconnected.
So how can we fully live life and be present if we are disconnected?
We have to ask ourselves, what are we willing to do to move past this when the old solutions of all the diets, pills, surgeries and using different modalities is not getting us to that core, to actually feeling at ease, feeling free in ourselves.
When I talk to women, they try so many things.
But it doesn’t go away. So we need an approach that is holistic, that’s looking at all of these layers. Because it’s not just one layer. This one layer is made out of many layers. That’s why when I work with clients and we move through 3 main layers in The Emotional Eating Evolution Program. Food, our body and our emotions.
If we don’t look at our emotions, our relationship to food or our body and we’re not catching all the layers. We’ll feel like we’re still chasing something and we don’t understand what’s really going on. This is a really disempowering place to be in.
I totally get it because I was trying everything to help me because I didn’t understand the layers that went into this pattern.
Emotional Eating is Multilayered
I tell my clients to experiment, to experience change. But we can’t spend our whole lives just going out and trying every single thing without a rhyme or reason or without a deeper understanding of this pattern.
I see women who are stuck in this pattern for decades. That’s sad because when we’re stuck in this pattern, it means our thoughts and our energy are devoted to obsessive thoughts about food, our body and pushing things away.
So we might be able to move forward in our life, but it’s not easeful, it’s not peaceful. There is this invisible layer, this thing we’re wearing, but it could consists of so many other layers that is holding us back.
In order to move through this, to start feeling at ease in our body and around food, we need to work through each of these layers because emotional eating is a multilayered. We need to start working through layers around our relationship to food, our relationship to our body and our relationship to our emotions.
The Shift
When we shift these areas, the way we can tell this layer is dissolving is that we don’t feel that restriction. We won’t feel like we’re going through life with the brakes on, which is that discomfort in our body. We feel more ease and peace and we can physically feel this in our nervous system. We go from fight or flight to rest and digest.
When we’re in ease and peace, rest and digest, our digestion is better, our health is better, we will release weight we no longer need.
When we move through those layers around food, our body and our emotions.
And so what we’re actually doing is shifting from, let’s say around food, a really restrictive mentality around food, or confusion around food.
What should we do?
1. Shifting to a way that’s nourishing our body, meeting our true needs, connecting to food. This helps us see our emotional eating triggers and connect to our hunger cues in our body.
2. When we shift from punishing our body and feeling shame around our body to a more accepting way of being with our body. Acceptance is not loving or liking our body. It’s a neutral space where we’re no longer criticizing ourselves. From here, we can create appreciation. We can honour our body’s rhythms and rituals and stop that shame spiral that triggers us into emotional eating.
3. Then with the emotional layer, this is where we’re looking at the ways we have avoided our emotions. Our emotions are so key to getting in touch with our deeper truth of what’s true for us, also in touch with our limiting beliefs so that we can start seeing what’s been going on in our life. When we shift this, we’re looking at these unresolved emotions, these traumas that live in our body. We are meeting our true needs, creating resolution so we can move forward in a powerful way where we’re no longer just using food as a band aid. So we’re showing up in our lives authentically. We start feeling peace and ease in our body.
We have limiting beliefs around food, our body, our emotions that we need to shift out of and resolve. This is how we start removing that layer. We start feeling at ease, we start feeling peace around food and in our body and our life.
This leads to…
Then we can use that clear space, that presence, to be available to our kids, to our partners, to our career, to our ambitions, our goals.
That might seem really big right now, but the discomfort of just obsessing about food and your body that doesn’t need to be that way. You don’t need to constantly be thinking about that. You can take care of your body and have an amount of concern for your body and what you’re eating to care for yourself, but not in an obsessive way.
This is what we do inside of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program with a step by step methodology, coaching, accountability, and in depth somatic meditation sessions to resolve this pattern. If this is resonating for you, I’d love to invite you to check out more about The Program HERE.
To presence,
~Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist Specializing in Emotional Eating
