Hello love,
Today I wanted to talk about moving towards the pain if you are an emotional eater or compulsive dieter.
Emotional eaters use food to cope with their emotions. If you are a chronic dieter you can be very critical of yourself and use diets to try to get to that “perfect” size. In both situations there is a lot of pain. We’re in physical pain because we are restricting so much and emotionally there is a lack.
When I say go towards the pain I mean move towards the emotion.
Check out the video below:
So what happens when we have these patterns?
When we emotionally eat or restrict ourselves we are just putting a bandaid on the pain with food. Because we push ourselves so much throughout the day or week or month with restricting eventually our willpower runs out. We can’t handle the pain anymore and we need something to take away the pain.
This is partly physiological and also emotional. When painful emotions bubble up we turn to food to cope.
When we do that we sabotage ourselves and feel guilt and shame. We vow to do better and start the next day with another diet. The cycle begins again.
Move towards the pain…
When I say move toward the pain, I want you to ask why are you using food to cover up the emotion. What are the actual emotions. What is going on.
This can be hard to do because we are not taught how to be with our emotions, that they are even of value. We taught to run away from them, distract, avoid or push past them.
We are not taught to dive into them because it’s painful and we want to avoid pain. But we create more pain by avoiding it. Our emotions are directing us back to ourselves to what we are feeling and what we are experiencing – if we can sit with them long enough.
Once you start sitting with the emotion and start discovering why you are avoiding it you start to get answers. You start to uncover what needs you have that are unmet and trying to meet with food.
Some issues with other methods:
A lot of strategies used to deal with emotional eating such as a therapist only look at the thoughts and stories. It does not dive into the body where emotion lives.
If you look to the next fitness guru with a new diet or plan they are not thinking about your emotional health and your true motivation. It might only be about weight loss and not about nourishing yourself.
And so there are all these disjointed parts. When you want to get to a real solution to nourish your body and self you need to look at all aspects, your physical body and emotional needs. When you start putting these together you can heal emotional eating.
So that is why it’s important to go toward the pain, explore it and not run away from it. I hope this video has illuminated more about emotional eating it takes time but its not impossible to overcome.
It is really powerful to see what those emotions are telling us and it is really a guidance in our lives.
They say pain is the greatest teacher and the more we can move towards pain and befriend it and learn how to move through it and through our emotions the more empowered and resilient we will become.
Let me know if this makes sense, leave a comment below 🙂
To resiliency,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist.
