Hello love,
Today I wanted to share with you why you feel like you’re constantly battling yourself on your emotional eating journey. It’s something that I see with clients.
I see this when I work with clients and do the deeper work on their emotional eating. I do somatic meditations with psychotherapy tools, using inner child work and parts work and I can see these parts of them.
Are you fighting yourself?
These clients have spent years and decades fighting themselves. Willpowering themselves through a diet, forcing themselves into a certain box or trying to control the way they’re eating. It’s not necessarily only to look a certain way, but because their health depends on it.
There’s this internal battle going on and every time they emotionally eat or binge, they feel like they’ve lost the battle. They feel like there’s this devil that they need to conquer.
“I’m going to move through this. I’m going to get through this pattern. I am going to conquer youuuuuuu!”
“I am stronger than it!” Ahhhhhh
What they fail to realize is that if one part of them is bingeing and one part of them is saying no, they’re still both parts of them. They’re not separate. So they are fighting themselves. They’re battling themselves to conquer a part of themselves.
I don’t know about you, I don’t want to be conquered. I don’t want to have an internal war. It doesn’t feel very pleasant if one part of you loses and one part of you wins because you still lose. It doesn’t feel good at all.
We need to move through this in a much different way.
What’s taught to us is to battle and fight ourselves. To conquer ourselves and push past ourselves.
Would you want to do that to another person?
I’m assuming no.
So why are you doing that internally?
What I’ve seen with clients and experienced myself is that when we do that, we don’t get very far. We can willpower and push past ourselves, but the other part of us is stronger, especially in emotional eating.
When you have tried every diet and plan out there and you still end up binging and emotionally eating, this part is much stronger.
Internal Fighting Makes THAT Part of You Stronger
By you pushing it, you’re actually making it become more powerful because there is no understanding or learning how to work with this part of you. What I usually see is consciously we want to eat in a certain way, we want to be a certain way, but then we end up emotionally eating.
There’s a part of us going towards food to soothe, but part of us that really wants to eat well and take care of our health.
There’s also this part of us that’s not very open to having vulnerability or emotions or knowing what to do in times of stress or whatever trigger comes up. It feels it can just push past it. It feels it’s so strong, it’s overcome so much. It is just going to be powerful. That has gotten us really far in our life.
But at the same time, we’re not looking at all of us. We are not just this iron wall, this strong person. We have vulnerabilities, we have emotions, we have all of these things.
Usually the pattern I see is that emotions are not meant to be really entertained or seen. If they are – you’re weak.
If you think about this, does it sound familiar to you?
Does it sound like how your parents viewed emotions or your caregivers or our society? For me, I felt like I was very sensitive as a child and I felt a lot of things, but that because my parents couldn’t hold that space. I got shamed for that. I felt something was wrong with me. Whereas now that’s probably one of the greatest things that I can have is to feel and to teach others to feel and to have emotions and to really attune, especially with my son. I’m not perfect, I’m still on this journey.
But if we notice, if we keep constricting our emotions, what happens is that we push them so far down we don’t even notice them until they bubble up into this emotional eating and out of control behaviour.
Whenever we suppress an emotion, we either go into extremely expressing it or depressing it. These extremes are not healthy.
When we have this mentality about emotions we’re not understanding and lack compassion. It’s becomes hard to connect to that part of us that is using food to soothe because it’s only doing that because it doesn’t know another way.
It’s hard to communicate with that part unless we know how to go deeper. We need to go deeper because this part lives in our subconscious. It’s automatic. We need tools to go deeper. This is why I love doing the somatic meditations with my clients, with the psychotherapy tools. We can access this deeper layer and bring a lot of compassion and safety to exploring these unresolved events. This makes moving through these unprocessed emotions, getting to the root, resolving it and then moving forward much more powerful and easeful.
So there’s no longer this internal battle. No more monitoring yourself because both parts of you are in agreement to move forward. There’s internal harmony.
This is powerful and amazing.
If you were talking to someone you wouldn’t want to push and criticize them into something. Or if that is the way you are, maybe that is what you’re doing to yourself internally. That is not kind or loving to yourself. It’s not going to create transformation.
When I work with clients and we get to this deeper level, it’s really amazing and profound how they can shift. When this alignment happens internally, we naturally start feeling good in our body. We start feeling at ease.
We drop that stress and tension. Food no longer becomes this thing we use to soothe. We can have this healthy relationship to food and to our body. We start seeing clearly. The thing is that the more we hold in our emotions or cope with them, we prevent our brains from actually maturing.
We need to feel and move through our emotions to mature our prefrontal cortex, which is where we have our logic and reasoning. The more we stifle our emotions, the less likely we’re going to have that full capacity that we’re meant to.
While we may think we’re smart to bulldoze ourselves. Pushing and conquering ourselves is actually doing the opposite. We are taking away from our potential and we’re not evolving.
This is an invitation for you to really think about how you react to emotions. If you have children around you, if you have loved ones, if you have relationships, how are you with emotions?
Invitation
If what I’m sharing is resonating for you and you want to go deeper, you want to really resolve your emotional eating from the root and get into this pattern, I’d love to invite you find out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program here. If you are ready to resolve your emotional eating from the root apply + book in an Emotional Eating Assessment call here to discuss your goals and how we can support you.
To harmony,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist + Emotional Eating Expert.
