Hello love,
Today I wanted to share a bit more about why food doesn’t have power over you. As an emotional eater, you’ve just given a lot of your power over to food.
I wanted to to talk about this because when we are emotional eaters – and I know when I was emotionally eating and trying to figure this out – we feel so out of control with food.
For me food had this power, it could just take me over, I would be at its mercy. A lot of my clients feel the same way.
They feel like…
“Why does food have so much power?”
“Why am I constantly thinking about it, constantly obsessing about food?”
“Why do I feel like I have no control?”
It’s almost like food is pulling the strings and you’re the puppet and you can never seem to overcome it. What I want to say is that food doesn’t have power over you. You’ve given a lot of your power over to food.
This feeling out of control and feeling like food is luring you in and the taste and all of that, it’s actually coming from you. You have the ultimate power. There’s a part of you that is pulling the strings that’s making you go towards food.
To be honest, food can just be and you don’t have to avoid certain foods. You don’t have to push it away, you don’t have to have certain tactics in order to be okay around food.
*Once you resolve your emotional eating*
When I say resolve your emotional eating, I’m specifically talking about my clients that have gone through my process.
There are lots of women that come to me that have tried many solutions that don’t get them to that point. My ultimate goal through my program and what I’ve seen with myself and my clients is that they resolve their emotional eating from the root. They figure out what’s going on.
What’s pulling you towards food
There is this part of you that is pulling you towards food. This part of you using food to help you cope is triggered whenever you are in a stressful situation. You might be aware of it or not. You go towards food in order to balance yourself out, to feel good, to regulate yourself.
It’s not a healthy mechanism, it’s not a resolution. It is a way of coping, which is unhealthy.
Of course, I’m sure you’ve been in this pattern for many years. I was in this pattern for many years and over time, my tactics to try to control food and my body escalated. I was trying and trying to the point where I had to give up and start from scratch again.
When was this created?
So this part of you that’s pulling the strings is a part of you that is usually created in childhood. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s a way we learn to deal with the discomfort in our life. Because we didn’t have the parents caregivers to help us regulate ourselves when we were going through stressful situations.
They didn’t model to us how to be with emotions. They couldn’t hold that space for us and couldn’t meet our deeper needs. We might “think” it was all fine, but sometimes the things that we’re missing are the most potent and impact us and this is where trauma comes into play.
I don’t mean that to say it’s trauma as we know it, trauma is on a spectrum. A lot of my clients go through “traumatic” things but it just means something was left unresolved for you which creates discomfort. You needed to figure out a way to soothe yourself. Food is an amazing tool for that because when we eat food physiologically. It makes us feel good and releases endorphins which soothes us. But this is temporary and it’s not resolving the issue we have. It’s not meeting that deeper need.
Food can only go so far…
Food can only go so far and give us sort of this temporary high so we need to dig deeper. When I work with clients inside of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program, we are looking to resolve this part of you.
To give this part of you a new way of being and to resolve what happened. Because right now it thinks the only way it’s going to resolve this discomfort is through food. It’s pattern that constantly makes you go to food. You might be wondering “why do I keep doing that?”. It’s because this part of you is subconscious.
This part of you is subconscious
This part of you using food is very powerful and it can take you over when it’s triggered. It takes you over because our subconscious has about 90% to 95% power in those situations. Our conscious mind has about 5% to 10% power over our actions.
If you think about your heart beating or breathing you can’t control that no matter how much you try. You would have to be a profound meditator to have that level of impact and control in that moment. These processes are run by the subconscious.
We love things that are automatic and subconscious like driving our car or walking. We don’t have to think about it. But when it’s a pattern that’s not beneficial to us, we need to change it and we can’t just willpower our way with our mind. We have to go deeper.
How to go deeper?
One of the main ways we do that is through somatic meditations inside of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program. We get into the subconscious in the body and resolve what’s going on, on this deeper level. We hold trauma and unresolved emotions in our body. As we move through that process and resolve it we’re able to create a new way forward that meets our true needs. This means that this pattern will dissolve.
All the diets and exercise plans and all of these things are like bandaid solutions unless we get to this deeper root. We need to resolve it at the root so we can create the change we desire.
So when we can’t make the changes we want to make, we so badly want to make, there’s something in the way of it. Especially with emotional eating.
When we resolve the pattern on this deeper level, food no longer has that power over you because you realize you’ve been giving food that power. You realize that food has been this placeholder trying to meet your needs.
Meeting your true needs
As we do the deeper work your true needs will appear and it is individual for each client that I have. I could give you generic solutions but that doesn’t work.
When we get into who you are and we go deeper, it’s going to be a specific solution for you that’s going to feel good, that’s going to click. I work with clients with this individually and also they have meditations they can guide themselves through to find the deeper root and what they need.
Once you do that, you start detaching from food and it no longer has this power.
As you’re resolving your emotional eating pattern, you start feeling good in your body because you’re no longer just abusing food and using it in this way. Your body starts opening up.
You body is no longer going to crave certain foods. It’s going to really feel into how certain foods make it feel.
A piece of the puzzle
Please note I have highlighted the Emotional Wellness piece of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program.
In the program, there are other phases that support resolving the emotional eating pattern. They are True Nourishment, Body Acceptance and of course Emotional Wellness. All of these combined help us dissolve this pattern and create a healthy way to move forward with food, with our body and with our emotions.
Invitation
If what I’m saying to you is resonating I’d love to invite you to check out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program here. This is my step by step methodology and program with lots of support + guidance to help you move through the emotional eating pattern so that you can finally feel at ease, free and confident in your body and around food.
To integrating your power,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist + Emotional Eating Expert
