Hello love,
I wanted to share the difference between treating the surface symptoms of emotional eating versus the root. The majority of the time what we are sold to help our emotional eating is treating the symptoms.
They are surface level solutions. Like the diets, exercise plans, personal training, even talk therapy & behaviour change. You end up doing all of these things thinking it will resolve your problem. I get it, I did the same thing.
But emotional eating has deeper roots.
We need to first understand the root of emotional eating in order to have sustainable change.
What is emotional eating?
Emotional eating is a coping mechanism, a coping pattern that helps us deal with distress and discomfort. When this is the way we learn to cope we go to food to soothe.
It’s root are in childhood. We weren’t always out of control of our body or around food. Something happened to create this pattern. So when we think we have to change our behaviour we are missing the mark. The root then grows branches.
We might have also been modelled to cope with food or given food when we were emotional. We were not shown how to regulate ourselves and be with our emotions.
I find with a lot of my clients their emotions were shamed or dismissed and so they needed to cope. Coping does not resolve the emotion and we are left with that discomfort once the food wears off.
Food is pleasurable and we associate it with love and care. In our society food is used as a bandaid a lot. We’re given food when we are uncomfortable or emotional. It becomes easy to have this pattern develop.
The pattern solidifies…
Over time as we grow and are faced with more and more discomfort. Which means more and more emotional eating. We might not realize where the pattern is coming from because if we are not aware of our emotions it’s hard to see the connection.
Then we feel out of control around food and in our body and we want to fix it. We go towards the diets and solutions sold to us. We think we need to change our behaviour but don’t realize it was created by a deeper issue and trying to meet a deeper need.
We pile on the diets, criticize our body and layer on more and more and we don’t know how to be with our emotions. We are using these surface level solutions and not looking at the root.
What’s needed
We now need to go through the branches to get to the root. We now have a diet mentality, body image issues and stuck emotions under the surface. We need to go through all of these layers in order to resolve emotional eating.
In The Emotional Eating Evolution Program we go through each of these layers. These are the layers we don’t have a healthy relationship with.
>>We are using food to soothe ourselves and the this not the role of food.
>>Using our body to give us worth and that is not its role.
>>We are suffocating our emotions and bypassing them and not knowing how to truly meet our needs.
This is where we need sustainable change around this pattern because it has layers. This pattern is multilayered and multifaceted.
When we move through these areas and get to the roots which are with food, our body and emotions and resolve them we get to the ease, freedom and confidence around food and our body.
Treating the symptoms does not resolve this pattern long term. We need to work on resolving the root.
If this is something that is missing for you Id love to invite you to check out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program my step by step methodology, with lots of support and guidance to help you resolve your emotional eating sustainably.
To true resolution,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist + Emotional Eating Expert
