Have you ever eaten something and immediately spiralled? It wasn’t really about the food – It was what you were saying to yourself about it after that spiralled you.
Emotional eating isn’t always triggered by the food you’re eating. It’s triggered by the thoughts you’re thinking about what you’re eating.
Because when you judge what you ate, it creates shame. And that shame triggers how you feel about yourself.
So today we’re going to dive into how the way you’re thinking about food can be triggering your emotional eating.
Let’s say you eat something while you’re on a diet. It doesn’t fall into your diet plan. You have the food, and immediately you think, “oh my God, I shouldn’t have had that. I’ve had too much”. You start spiralling.
This spiral makes you feel shame, like, “oh my God, I screwed up again. I have no discipline. I’ll never get this right”. And so this is just playing into that shame spiral. That feeling of shame is coming from your nervous system being activated and feeling dysregulated and uncomfortable.
So your body says, we need to get back to calm. We need to regulate.
Cue emotional eating, because that’s how you get back to calm, how you soothe yourself.
So your emotional eating is tied into your diet mentality, because you’re judging yourself for the foods that you choose or not choose.
This isn’t to say we don’t need to eat in ways that nourish us and help us feel good. But when we’re really attached to diets – when we’re really trying to control food because we feel so out of control with food, we put a lot of judgement on ourselves to be perfect.
And this is playing into a deeper wound we have about not being acceptable of not feeling good enough.
When we use diets to control ourselves, we develop a rigid way of thinking. We think we need to be “disciplined” and “perfect”.
You have thoughts like:
I have to eat perfectly.
I have to be disciplined.
I have to look a certain way to be accepted.
I should be better by now.
I should know better.
Let’s dive in.
- 2:09 How these judgements trigger emotional eating
- 2:49 Shifting your attitude towards food – the role of true nourishment
- 4:02 Using diets to control shame backfires – why are we trying to control food?
- 5:28 Working with emotional eating at these 2 levels to resolve the pattern
- 6:04 What does true nourishment look and feel like?
- 8:22 Emotional eating has layers – it’s not a straight line
- 9:30 Free resources and next steps
Next Steps
1. If you are ready to start your journey to resolving your Emotional Eating you can download my free guide “What Are You Truly Hungry For?” to start discerning true from emotional hunger and catching your triggers HERE.
2. If you are ready to transform your emotional eating so that you can get to ease, peace and confidence around food and in your body with a step by step process and guidance then find out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program HERE.
To healing,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist Specializing in Emotional Eating
