Hello love,
I wanted to share more on why we need to eat more as emotional eaters not less.
And why advice telling you to just stop eating so much is not getting to the deeper root cause of this pattern.
Recently a client told me she was advised to just stop eating so much by an emotional eating expert.
This made me cringe inside. This showed me that this expert didn’t really understand this pattern.
When you’re going through an emotional eating binge and you’re ravenous and say to yourself “I shouldn’t be doing this” that piles shame on top of shame.
That is not the solution to help your emotional eating. You need to get to the root.
Getting to the root – True Nourishment
With clients we work through the emotional eating pattern in The Emotional Eating Evolution Program through different phases.
The first phase we work through is True Nourishment. I notice a lot of my clients have a diet mentality and are really restrictive about their food.
They have been restricting food and don’t nourish themselves throughout the day. They skip out on meals and then they binge.
If you are not creating time and space to nourish yourself throughout the day you’re going to end up bingeing. This doesn’t mean you have no self control. This means you are not listening to our body’s cues.
When you’ve been on so many diets what usually happens is that you don’t trust your own hunger cues or don’t know how to feel them. This was something I experienced myself – I thought i was hungry all the time.
Using food to soothe, eating all the time and feeling like nothing would satisfy me.
More on Hunger
When I started to discern true from emotional hunger it was ground breaking. That led me to nourishing my body throughout the day and satisfying my hunger on all levels. I teach this to clients – there are 4 components to satisfying hunger. One of them is being able to eat until you stomach feels satisfied physically.
This is not about diet mentality, and calories and eating in a way that leaves you feeling ravenous.
There are different components to hunger we need to look at. When we are able to nourish ourselves we can eliminate some of the bingeing we create in the afternoon and sometimes evening with poor nourishment.
We need to nourish our body in order to discern if we are bingeing out of lack of nourishment or because of being triggered into our emotional eating and going towards food to soothe ourselves.
Discerning Emotional Triggers
When we are able to nourish ourselves and eat more throughout the day we can really pinpoint that emotional eating pattern and feel this is the deeper issues going on.
Once we discern this and start working on the emotional eating pattern then we can transform it and we will no longer use food to soothe or provide relief.
I had a client describe it as just pushing down the emotion bubbling up with more and more food. We do these things because as a society we haven’t been taught how to be with our emotions and how to move through them.
Resolving Trauma allows you to feel
It’s not as simple as sitting and feeling your emotions if you haven’t been taught how to regulate yourself or never felt safe to feel.
We need to learn how to move through those emotions and understand they are giving us information and to discern what is true for us and what are our next steps.
When we are able to do this we will no longer go to food to cover this up. And we won’t “eat as much” lol This is how the behaviour changes, when the true need is met.
We will then go to food out of hunger not soothing. This is how we start creating that healthy relationship to food and our body. We can now respect the place food holds, one in which it nourishes us not soothes us.
And of course food is pleasurable but we don’t wan to use it to numb out.
One we are able to move through these layers we create a relationship to food and our body that feels good. Inside of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program we work through emotional eating in a few phases to get to the deeper roots of this pattern. We’re removing the layers and we’re not just slapping on a behaviour change.
Steps you can start taking right now
Look at your dialogue with food – are you constantly restricting yourself, or obsessively monitoring yourself?
Do you feel satisfied after meals?
Do you eat regularly?
Do you know your hunger cues?
If we don’t know the above basic things, we might think we are eating “well” and nourishing ourselves because we are following some plan but we need to connect to our own body and see what works for us. We are all individual.
We need to know our cues and what satisfies us.
When we are able to do that and truly nourish our body throughout the day we get better at pinpointing the emotional eating triggers.
Summary
To summarize we can be triggered into bingeing when we haven’t honoured our physical nourishment needs as in we haven’t eaten enough nutritious food. Once this is satisfied we can see the emotional eating triggers more clearly.
Inside of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program we resolve the different layers of emotional eating. The program comes with lots of support, accountability, coaching, meditations, a step by step plan and guidance. Find out more about the program HERE. If this is resonating with you and you are ready to resolve your emotional eating apply + book in an assessment call here to discuss your goals, where you are at and how we can support you.
To true nourishment,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist + Emotional Eating Expert.
