Hello love,
Today I want to share with you why emotional eating is not just about food and your body. It’s about your life.
I wanted to talk about this because this was an aha to one of my clients. She was so stuck in perfecting food and fixing this issue. I told her emotional eating, food and all the other things we associate with this pattern is on the surface. There’s so much more going on under the surface that we don’t see.
This is not just about food or your body. It’s about your life. How you treat yourself, how you care for yourself and how you live moment to moment.
Emotional Eating is a gateway. What I find with women is that they tend to compartmentalize their emotional eating.
“I’m just going to get my food and my body under control”. They don’t realize how much it impacts them in their life.
My rock bottom
So something that I always think about and I share in my own story of my emotional eating is my big rock bottom.
Nothing was working. I couldn’t figure it out. I’d been going to so many practitioners. I was going to therapy, I had a chiropractor, a personal trainer. I was doing all the “things”. I was writing my thoughts out. I was doing so much and nothing was working.
I remember just looking back at that version of myself and feeling like I had this filter over my life. This pattern was impacting MY LIFE not just food, not just my body.
It showed up in how I was being in my life, how I didn’t show up at work, in my insecurities, in how my body felt and looked, how I would hide with my posture, in my digestion in my sense of peace. And the list goes on.
It felt like a think goo that I was stuck in. This layer of feeling ashamed and feeling so uncomfortable and gross in my body.
Is this you too? From mental real estate to showing up in you body.
You’re carrying this around moment to moment just by obsessing about food and constantly criticizing yourself. That is happening all the time. For most of the day. That’s what our mind is doing.
Having these obsessive thoughts is impacting your life. It’s taking up a lot of mental real estate, thinking about food and criticizing ourselves.
This also translates into your body. It translates to unease in your body, around food and in your life.
Feeling at ease in your body and around food opens up space for you to move forward in your life. For you to go after the things that you want to, for you to feel present and whole in yourself.
The results
This is something that comes up when I have clients moving through their emotional eating and resolving it. There’s a sense of wholeness and presence.
This is something I noticed with myself when I started resolving my emotional eating. I wasn’t obsessing about my body, I wasn’t obsessing about food. I could be hungry and then have a meal. It wasn’t this thing that kept looping and that was so freeing.
The obsession takes up space
It’s taking us away from our goals, our ambitions, our energy and it’s taking up a lot of space.
Once we stop the obsession with food and our body we can start nourishing ourselves and honoring our body. We can look at the deeper pattern with our emotional eating and resolve those triggers. This opens us up to more wholeness and more life.
What’s under the food?
Think about food is just at the tip of the iceberg and under the food are all of these things you’ve been hiding from.
The obsession with your body, with food, self worth issues, boundary issues, not truly nourishing yourself, lack of self care, emotional neglect, self esteem issues, shame and the list goes on…
On the other side
When we move through that, it’s going to bring us closer to ease and peace in our body. When we stop avoiding and we start directly looking at what’s happening and gain acceptance, that’s what’s going to shift our nervous system from fight or flight to rest and digest.
If we keep compartmentalizing our emotional eating, we don’t get to these deeper layers.
We might think, “yes, my career is going well and this is going well with my kids”. But if we don’t have that deeper connection to ourselves, we’re not showing up fully in our work, we’re not showing up fully for our kids. If we feel shame in our body, we’re not showing up fully for a relationship. We’re not showing up fully in our day to day life because we feel this shame, we feel these layers.
Everyone wants to feel more whole, to feel more ease, peace and freedom. Emotional Eating is the gateway, it’s the doorway to getting you there. Because as you start connecting back to food, your body and your emotions, you start removing these obsessive thoughts. You start meeting your true needs.
From mental to physical
These thoughts are obsessive and constant and are unhealthy. This directly translates into our body because those thoughts produce biochemicals, they produce messengers, they produce stress that creates a nervous system that is now in fight or flight.
This creates stress symptoms like digestive issues, inflammation, disease, weight gain.
When we’re able to resolve our emotional eating step by step we shift our nervous system to rest and digest. That means that the chemicals that are produced in our body are going to be more calming.
We’re going to have a peaceful nervous system and that’s going to be reflected in our health. So then our body’s turned on for better digestion, absorbing nutrients, elevating our health, boosting our immune system, reducing inflammation, moving past disease and chronic issues, and releasing weight it doesn’t need, restoring hormonal balance.
All of these things are going to be happening when we have a nervous system that feels like that. But we need to move through the layers from food, our body and our emotions.
This is what creates the ease, peace and confidence in our body, around food and in our life.
We’ve been doing it backwards
We’ve been going about this in a backwards way where we restrict our food, we shame our body, we bypass our emotions. We can willpower away, but that underlying pattern is still there.
If you haven’t resolved those deeper core issues then you’re not going to be able to fully shift into this new way of being because you’ll keep facing resistance.
Inside of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program this is what we’re doing layer by layer
->through realigning your relationship to food so it is more abundant and healthy
->realigning your relationship to your body where you’re honoring your body and accepting it
->And realigning your relationship to your emotions where you’re actually moving through, processing and integrating so that you’re no longer using food to soothe yourself.
All of these need to be in place to resolve your emotional eating from the root.
Invitation
So if this is resonating for you and you’d like to dive deeper, resolve your emotional eating from the root so you can finally feel at ease, peace and confident around food, in your body and life I’d love to invite you to find out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program HERE.
To integration,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist Specializing in Emotional Eating
