Hello love,
Today I wanted to share with you more about how truly nourishing your body is the foundation to moving past your emotional eating. When I was moving past my emotional eating I was adding in foods that nourished my body and that helped me to move forward in my emotional eating journey.
It had helped me to connect back to food, to really see how it benefited body, how I felt. That momentum helped me to create more and more change and to move past the emotional eating. It helped me to see the difference between when I felt really great eating foods that nourished me versus when I would binge and eat foods that didn’t nourish me.
So as emotional eaters, we tend to go towards processed foods when we want that kind of emotional payoff or to distract us from whatever emotions we’re feeling. It’s not a choice in that moment. It’s almost a compulsion and addiction. We usually develop this from a really young age. We either see our caregivers doing this or we develop this habit ourselves.
Food + Love
Something I haven’t mentioned before is that when we’re really young we connect with our mothers through breast milk and in essence food. So breast milk and food meant love and attention. So there is this deep connection between food and feeling loved. There is a biochemical response in our body when we physically eat foods of feeling good. There was that connection, an attachment to when we had foods. So I want you to kind of take that in.
That food can mean connection. It can mean love. And also that’s happening in our body when we emotionally eat.
Adding in nourishment…
As I added in more nourishing foods, I did this very intuitively. The more I healed my emotional eating the more I was able to hear my body. I can look back and see the patterns I was moving out of. I was trying my best to feel good (healthy) in my body and choosing foods that would make me feel this way.
As I was on that journey and became more connected to food, I started to see how the qualities of the food gave me new energy and new life. Of course, I can go and cite all of this nutritional information. But if we just pause for a minute and really think about the foods we’re putting in our body and we think about the qualities of the food; like the texture, the sheen, the vibrancy, colour, the energy and how easily it digests in our body. We take on those qualities when we eat those foods.
Connecting more deeply
If we go a step further for example plant foods, they take in the elements (minerals) of the Earth and the sun (light). We are literally eating sunshine and we’re eating this energy that’s coming from the sun and we’re taking in the minerals from the earth. And so that further connects us not only to our bodies, but to the earth and to our environment.
A lot of the times as an emotional eater, we’re disconnected from the world. We’re disconnected emotionally, we’re disconnected mentally, we’re disconnected physically. Through food we start rebuilding that connection to the world around us noticing that our food comes from the earth.
You can feel the call
I have this weird little thing that if I’m around fruits and vegetables, I just want to touch them because they’re so beautiful. They have this vibrancy. They just call to me. I feel amazing being around them. They’re nature. It’s like being in nature. There is an energy that’s emitted by these foods.
It is important for us to notice how we feel around these foods and feel eating them, that gives us even more motivation to move forward and eat them. This is what happens to a lot of clients when we start incorporating more fruits and vegetables, morning smoothies, etc. They start seeing how it feels in their body, the properties, what it’s doing to them – cleansing our system, rebalancing it, satiating them, and deeply nourishing their body.
What happens is that we take the edge off of our emotional eating because we’re nutritionally imbalanced in our body. We’re not truly nourished. We don’t have the nutrients and the vitamins and the minerals in our body. It offsets our moods as well. This is something I talk about in my program, the Emotional Eating Evolution. The first phase of moving past emotional eating is to start nourishing your physical body.
So we want to nourish ourselves on multiple levels. We want to nourish our body physically. We want to nourish our body mentally, and we want to nourish our body emotionally. When we start bringing in more and more nourishment to ourselves, we will start seeing more of a shift in our emotional eating.
NOTE: We are not 100% past the emotional eating because we still have to look at the emotions underneath. But a lot of the emotions start dissipating because they’re probably caused by an imbalance in the body.
Connecting more deeply to food – Green foods
So I’m going to add in one other thing here, and that is if we think about foods, this is just another thing to connect you even more to foods. If we look at green foods, for example spinach or broccoli, that green colour is from chlorophyll. If we look at the molecular structure of chlorophyll, it is almost exactly the same as hemoglobin in our red blood cells. The only thing is that in chlorophyll there’s magnesium and in hemoglobin there’s iron. The magnesium creates the green colour and the iron creates a red colour in our blood.
And so a plant’s blood is literally like human blood. When we eat those green foods, we get to clean our blood out. We get to rebuild our blood from the inside out. And also that green colour, if we want to go a little bit deeper, is connected to our heart chakra. That is the energy of our heart, it is a loving energy. It’s bringing in more love and openness.
And, you know, that might sound woo woo. But if we look at the properties of green foods, they are cleansing the blood, it means more circulation and blood flow. Our heart pumps out our blood and we physically open up. We can open up our heart and our circulation by eating these green foods. So everything energetically connects physically. It’s all on a continuum. And, you know, the more you’re physically open in your body, the more you’re going to feel more loving and you’re going to have better perspective about yourself.
Some tips about adding in plant based foods
- So I just want to touch in about nourishment and some tips to add. And as I’ve been talking about green foods is that when you nourish your body, truly nourish your body on the physical level, you’re taking an abundance of fruits and vegetables. Your plate is at least 50 percent in vegetables.
- You’re not afraid of fruits. They’re very cleansing. But I would suggest having them on an empty stomach
- Make your meals more plant based. I’m not saying be a vegan, but adding in more of these fruits and vegetables, they are going to give you an abundance of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients. especially the green vegetables.
If you’re an emotional eater, there are some level of disconnection and not feeling this deeper love that we can now bring into our foods and see that reflected back to us. So these fruits and vegetables, they give so much to our body. And it’s amazing what happens when you start incorporating more and more. I’ve seen it in clients over and over again and in myself because that’s how I started. That’s why I love my smoothies + salads.
I love all of the vegetables, because every time I look at it, I know what I’m giving to my body. I know what I’m feeding myself. I know how I’m nourishing myself. And I reaffirm that I am worthy of being nourished and I’m worthy of receiving nutrition, love and and self care.
If you’re ready to reconnect back to yourself and move past your emotional eating book in an Emotional Eating Assessment Call here to see if the Emotional Eating Evolution Program can support you.
To feeling worthy,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist + Emotional Eating Expert
