Hello love!
Today I want to share about the importance of nourishment for emotional eating and emotional eaters in general.
When I was on my emotional eating journey, nourishment was a big part of moving through my emotional eating. Nourishment helped to stabilize my body and have a better overall mood. The reason is that when we’re physically creating a strong, healthy body, it impacts how we move through and process our emotions. It impacts our moods on a physical level because our emotions are biochemical responses in our body.
Emotions have a biochemistry to them. They are tangible and physical in our body. So when we’re deeply nourishing ourselves, we help with this emotional aspect. I’m going to share a few ways how nourishment impacts emotional eating.
How Nourishment Impacts Emotional Eating
1. Physically Strong Container
The quality of our foods impact the body. The body is the container that holds our emotions.If we are creating a strong body, we have a strong foundation. We are going to be better able to hold our emotions and to process and to allow them to move through our body. So, for instance, this could be the same as if you’re building a house. So if you’re building a house, you want to make sure you have a strong foundation, you want to have good quality materials, you want it to stand the test of time.
If you build your house out of sand, paper, cardboard, things that are not structured and strong, you’re not going to get a strong foundation. But if you use steel, concrete, marble and good quality materials, you’re going to have a strong foundation and that’s going to be able to house you and with withstand any storms or any weather disturbances. That’s what our emotions are, disturbances that rattle our structure.
We need to be able to withstand it and hold it. When we’re eating really good quality foods, which tend to be more on the organic end because they don’t contain a lot of additional chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, other additional chemicals that impact our body, we’re going to have a stronger foundation, a stronger body. These chemicals impact the structure of our body in that they actually play with our hormones. A lot of these pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, mimic hormones like estrogens in our body.
This impacts our mood because these hormone-like chemicals disrupt our hormonal cycles. Our hormones impact our moods. So when we’re adding in these external sources, we’re going to imbalance our moods more. If you’re an emotional eater and your mood is compromised, you go towards the food.
2. Processed Foods
The second way that impacts us is eating processed foods. This goes back to the quality of foods. Processed foods give you that quick high. If you notice, whenever you’re emotionally eating, you probably go towards these foods, sweet or salty or whatever type of food you’re really drawn to. And that’s a way to tell you’re emotionally eating. You need a specific food.
When you eat these foods, they give you a more pleasurable feeling. Food already is pleasurable in our body, but when we’re eating these processed foods, we almost get this multi fold high. It creates an addictive behaviour that’s happening unconsciously in us. We go towards those foods and they create this high, but they’re not actually nourishing our body.
They’re depleting us and they’re making us temporarily feel good. But we’re not getting any nourishment out of it. And so whenever we’re eating these processed foods, they’re void of nutrients. We’re actually depleting our body of nutrients, getting the sort of high and not dealing with our emotions. And the more depleted we are in nutrients, the less able we are to handle our emotions and and to be that strong container to hold them so these foods don’t nourish us.
3. Stronger Nervous System
The third thing that I want to touch upon with nourishment is that when we eat nourishing foods it builds a strong nervous system. When our nervous system is strong it has the right nutrients and vitamins and minerals to process through emotions.
We can process and move through them. We’ll feel more empowered. That’s why a lot of yogic and more holistic philosophies talk about meditation and moving through your emotions along with nourishing your body. Nourishing food creates a higher mood or vibration in our body to hold those uncomfortable emotions, to process them so that we don’t deplete ourselves.
And so creating that physical container is just so important to moving through those emotions.
4. Nourishment and Digestion
When we are eating nourishing foods, we’ll have better digestion. A lot of diets and emotional eating programs don’t talk about digestion and how foods are being digested in the body. If we’re eating foods that are not digesting well in our system, we have gas, bloating, feel heavy after a meal.
This deeply impacts our microbiome and our gut. Our gut is where we produce a lot of neurotransmitters like serotonin. If we have indigestion that’s going to impact our production of neurotransmitters. Our gut directly communicates with our brain. This means that our mood is going to be poor. This will contribute to emotional eating, because, again, when we don’t have great moods, we want to feel good. And as emotional eaters, we tend to turn towards food to boost our mood. That puts us back in this cycle.
It’s important that we’re looking at these different aspects of nourishment to really understand how they impact our mood and our emotions.
And if we can balance those out and then also really look at the deeper emotions underneath. To sum it up, essentially whatever we put in our bodies, if it’s impacting our digestion or if it’s impacting our hormones, then it’s going to impact our mood. Imbalanced moods leads us to more emotional eating and it starts that cycle again.
I hope this video has been helpful. Please be sure to leave a comment if you have any questions. And please be sure to like and subscribe if you haven’t. And I look forward to sharing more with you.
To nourishment,
Michelle Lall
Certified Holistic Nutritionist
