Hello love,
So tell me, are you someone that feels like they can only be accepted if they look a certain way? You criticize your body or your behaviour. You feel like everyone’s judging you, and that spirals you into even more emotional eating because you feel like crap.
I wanted to share more about external validation and the emotional eating pattern.
This topic came up recently and comes up a lot with clients. You are walking around feeling constantly judged and criticized by others. You look down at your body and think, “oh, I don’t look the right way.”
We think people are judging us, people are saying things, and maybe they are, but it hasn’t always been this way.
There is an internal judgment and criticism happening that started way before the external experience of this.
So let me take you back to where this began. Emotional Eating is a coping mechanism. This means we use food to cope with discomfort, uncomfortable emotions, and things that don’t make us feel good.
This wouldn’t have started yesterday or a couple of years ago. This usually develops in childhood, because as children, we need our parents and caregivers to help us move through our emotions. To move through our discomfort, our stressors, to hold a really solid, safe container for us, and to help us regulate ourselves.
When we don’t have this, we don’t feel seen, heard, acknowledged, or accepted. We feel rejected. This lack of acceptance starts at a young age, and each of us is going to interpret it in a different way.
This is the pattern I see with clients. Because these qualities are basic needs.
At this young age we need to have our needs met externally. We need to be mirrored by our parents and caregivers. This is how we start learning about ourselves. When we don’t have this, it’s creates a hole. And we’re trying to fill it because our survival is based on it.
When we don’t get acceptance for example, we try to figure out ways to get it. We also have to deal with the discomfort and uncomfortable emotions of feeling rejected. Cue emotional eating.
So we “figure out” how to get acceptance from our parents or caregivers by acting a certain way, looking a certain way or doing certain things. This equals love in our mind and what we tell ourselves we need to be.
But what happens is that “version” of us is not really who we are and the version of us that has emotions and ups and downs is not being accepted. We hide our true self and suppress our true needs by trying to get it from others or covering it up with food.
You think if you look a certain way you’re accepted. You’re validated. But if you don’t have that deeper acceptance, you’re building this on a shallow foundation. You’re just chasing what you externally think will get you acceptance.
Maybe you’re able to sustain that. You can diet, you can exercise, you can get the right products and all of these things to make yourself look the way you think you need to look to feel accepted. But it’s not coming from a true place of expression. It’s coming from a place of lack that you need to look this way in order to be accepted while suppressing who you truly are.
This builds and builds and when you reach your “goal” and still don’t feel good, you go back to food to soothe.
You’re using food to soothe yourself. So it feeds into your emotional eating but you are chasing this false acceptance. All of this is on the surface. It’s not actually getting into the deeper layers.
Check out the video for more on:
- Why Are You Seeking External Validation?
- How this chase of the right body with surface solutions leads to more emotional eating
- Getting to the root of the pattern to meet your true needs
- The shift in the nervous system back to peace, ease and calm around food and in our body
- Learning a new authentic way to connect to food, our body and emotions
Invitation
If you would like to resolve your emotional eating at the root, you want to learn how to give yourself that true acceptance and you want to move away from chasing this external validation to actually feeling that ease, peace and confidence in your body and around food. I’d love to invite you to find out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program HERE.
To true acceptance,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist Specializing in Emotional Eating
