Hello love,
This week I wanted to share how emotional eating can impact your physical health.
How emotional eating directly impacts your physical health.
We usually emotionally eat to avoid and emotion or to cope with an emotion.
When we use food to cope we are not eating when we are physically hungry. So the body is not prepared to digest our food. This can create indigestion, feeling stuffed and bloated.
Over time this starts to impair our system. Our digestive system is external to our body so when we don’t treat it well we reduce it’s ability to get nutrients into our body in an efficient way. This starts to impact our overall health.
One symptom is weight gain which can lead to diabetes, hormonal imbalance, inflammatory conditions, etc.
We can also then use food to cope with these issues and create another cycle of emotional eating.
When health deteriorates…
We might think we need to do something and do a 180. But willpower and bulldozing doesn’t work.
What works is looking at the root cause of emotional eating. This is not simply about emotions but also how you nourish yourself and what you say to yourself.
Sustainable change
To create sustainable change we start to look at the emotions and make smaller changes. Starting to notice emotional hunger vs. physical hunger is important. From here you can dive deeper into the emotion and see what you truly need. You might need to feel, go for a walk, rest, leave a relationship, etc. The point is that the answer will come from you internally. This is empowering.
So to sum it up, emotional eating can create poor health physically but the solution is not simply changing the way you eat. Of course, if it was that simple you would have done it! This requires a holistic approach that includes your emotions, thoughts and how you nourish yourself.
So if you have been struggling with emotional eating and health issues you can connect the dots to see if they are related for you.
To health,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist.
