Hello lovely,
Today I wanted to share a bit about why it might feel like there’s this internal struggle when you emotionally eat. There is an internal struggle, almost like two parts of you having an argument in your head. This is something that I hear from a lot of clients.
It’s like they see themselves emotionally eating and going towards the food, wondering why are they doing that. This was my experience too. I was watching myself eating the food or being taken over by another part of me. Almost as if I was out of body. When this was happening to me when I was emotionally eating or binge eating, I didn’t know what was going on on a deeper level. Now I understand what was going on.
Review – what is emotional eating
Before we get into that, I just wanted to share with you that an emotional eater is someone that goes towards food to cope with their emotions. So whenever you feel an uncomfortable emotion or an emotion you don’t want to feel, you go towards food to numb out. Our emotions are meant to be felt and processed through our body and if we don’t feel them we hold them in. They become really uncomfortable. And so we need food to cover it up. It doesn’t get rid of the emotion it distract from it.
As a child…
Why there might be this internal struggle in your head? When we’re younger, we have a lot of needs. The way we know we need something is through our emotions.
If we’re sad or feeling hurt, we know that we are needing love or we’re needing something from our parents. We could not have given that to ourselves. So when we feel “X” emotion, it’s letting us know something’s wrong. It’s it’s a way to let our caregivers know something’s wrong or off. Emotions are data telling us that. They’re giving us information about our experience. But if we had caregivers that didn’t know how to be with our emotions to help us process through them, to understand them, then they wouldn’t have known how to meet our needs. They may have dismissed our emotions, pushed them away, or given us some food. Essentially done something to stop the way you were feeling.
This is not truly resolving the emotion or knowing what it’s needing. So you developed this way of being. So every time an emotion comes up you start treating the emotion the same way. So you dismiss and push it away. You use food to cover it up.
As an adult…
It’s not healthy, but it’s the way you cope. Now as an adult, when we become emotional and we go towards food, we’re out of control. We feel out of control around food. We can’t control our food or can’t control the types of foods we go to. This can lead to health issues and health problems. This thing that helped us cope has a life of its own.
It has a life of its own because it is a pattern from long ago. That childlike part of you is running the show deep in your subconscious, and it has a lot more power than the conscious adult you who wants to eat well and wants to take care of their body. So there is this internal battle. There’s adult you and smaller you battling it out. The smaller you really wants its needs met, but it only knows how to do that through food.
And the adult you is like, “no, I don’t want to meet the need through the food”. But what the adult you doesn’t do is meet the needs of the younger you or even know how to do that.
And so that’s how the need takes over. The younger part of you that wants the food, it takes over because the adult you hasn’t learned how to listen and understand the younger you and meet those needs.
How do we meet the needs of the emotion under the emotional eating?
The emotion has a lot of power.
A lot of times what we see with emotional eating advice is meet your needs, love yourself, wear red lipstick, take a bath. These are surface solutions. Those needs, yes, they are great for self care but we need to go deeper. We need to get to the root of the emotion and actually process it to hear the true need that needs to be met.
And then we need to to meet that need in a healthy way.
This is something we work through in The Emotional Eating Evolution Program. It’s about nourishing yourself and learning as an adult how to take care of yourself, nourish your body, move away from dieting and these fads and really start listening to your body, accepting your body. Then we get into the emotional realm where we’re processing the emotions, understanding and validating them so we can extract the true needs that need to be met.
It’s only when we truly meet those needs in a healthy way that emotional eating will dissipate. You will no longer have this internal struggle or battle, because as soon as you want to emotionally eat because you will meet your true needs.
If this is something that feels like it’s missing for you in your emotional eating journey, I invite you to book in a complimentary Emotional Eating Assessment call. This call will help you see if the program is a right fit for you to get you from point A to point B.
If you have any questions or comments, leave them below. I hope this video has been helpful. And I look forward to sharing more with you.
To integration,
~Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist + Emotional Eating Expert
