Hello love,
Today I want to share more about emotional eating and our addiction to food.
The way I define emotional eating is that emotional eating is a coping mechanism. A coping mechanism is something we do in order to sort of distract us, numb us from the uncomfortable emotions that are coming up, the stress that’s coming up. We don’t know how to directly deal with that, so we cope with it.
Coping is not a resolution. It’s more like a distraction. What I’ve find when I work with clients is that this pattern starts from childhood. This coping mechanism is an addictive pattern because whenever stress or these uncomfortable emotions come up, we go towards food.
It feels like it’s taking us over and it’s compulsive.
Childhood and Emotional Eating
When we are very young, we need our parents and caregivers to model to us how to move through discomfort. We need them to hold that physical space, to help us move through our discomfort or uncomfortable emotions. To have a strong nervous system and to help us resolve whatever’s coming up, and to meet our needs of being seen, heard, validated, accepted, etc.
The sad fact is that most of us did not receive this. 95% of families are dysfunctional. They’re on a scale of dysfunction, which means that most of us, were not getting our needs met. This doesn’t mean that we need to have our needs met 100% of the time. But if we look around at our society, we can see that most of us struggle and we don’t have a way of moving through that.
Most of us use food to some capacity to numb out or give us some sort of shift our mood. We also use other things, other addictions like social media, alcohol, shopping, etc. to not feel what we’re feeling. This is because we weren’t modelled this and we weren’t developmentally given these tools.
This is not to say that something is wrong with you. I totally get it. I went through my own emotional eating journey. I had to navigate this. I had to figure this out.
The solution is not on the surface
The solution was not just diet and exercise. Sometimes we think that, yeah, I don’t know how to nourish my body or I have this intense hunger. So we might learn about food or learn about the body and exercise. But when we have a coping mechanism and addiction to food and these patterns, there’s a deeper level going on. Because now we have learned to cope through these situations. We have to go deeper because now this pattern is more automatic and subconscious and we can’t just learn a new way.
We need to unhook from the old ways and resolve them so that we can actually create the new way moving forward.
When all the pieces are not in place
I recently saw someone sharing who was in the health space about their own struggles in their personal life of going through trauma, binging and using other addictions. They were just doing the food and the exercise and it’s so beyond the food and the exercise. They decided to use pharmaceutical interventions which they’ve been doing for a few months and it has “fixed them”.
But what I want to say is what they didn’t talk about after the honeymoon phase wears off.
I’ve talked to so many women who have used prescriptions, they’ve had the surgeries, they’ve done all the things and they are still in this compulsion of wanting food. So if you take an antidepressant or you take a prescription, it’s not a guarantee to stopping this pattern. It’s just a band Aid.
That level of emotion and what’s going on under the surface is pretty strong and like a weed grows through a crack in the concrete, so can our trauma. We can’t pave our streets and not expect nature to not come through.
Nature is just so much more powerful. And while we have pharmaceuticals and sometimes they’re needed when we put it on as a band Aid, it’s not going to help us.
CHECK OUT THE VIDEO FOR MORE ON
- Addictive patterns means there’s so much more under the surface
- Journalling, positivity, and forced forgiveness can be like ice cream on top of poop (when we don’t do the deeper work)
- We bypass emotions as a society
- Emotional Eating in multilayered
- Emotional eating is a pattern from childhood which has deep roots; neurally
- How do we resolve this addictive pattern?
- From using food to cope/restrict to true nourishment
- From shaming our body to acceptance
- To getting to the root of our emotional neglect and creating resolution
- You didn’t have your true needs met and now it’s on you to do the heavy lifting.
Invitation
Addictions are just a way that we’re attempting to meet a need, but it’s not truly meeting it. So we don’t ever feel resolve and we want more and more of it.
So if you are ready to resolve your emotional eating from the root, I’d love to invite you to find out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program. This is my twelve week container. It’s a step by step methodology full of lots of support and accountability and in depth somatic meditations. We’re getting to the root and creating this new way of being so that you can resolve your emotional eating and move forward powerfully. Find out more about it HERE.
To true resolution,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist Specializing in Emotional Eating
