Hello love,
It seems obvious that emotions would be part of emotional eating. However, I think we don’t focus on emotions when we do emotionally eat.
I know for me I know when I was on my emotional eating journey that I didn’t think about the emotions. I thought I had to control the actions I was taking.
Controlling the way I was eating, controlling my body, and overexercising were what I focused on. I was doing all the things to stop the symptoms like eating too much or trying to change my body. I was trying to control the external things and I didn’t think much about the emotions.
I didn’t even see the connection. Even though looking back I can see how I did eat when I didn’t feel good.
How do emotions play into this pattern?
Sometimes we think it’s the food we’re eating or our behaviour that’s the issue but it goes deeper than that. Emotional eating is when we use food to soothe ourselves from any discomfort or uncomfortable emotions.
Food is great for a temporary distraction because it makes us physiologically feel good. We do this because as a society and in our families we didn’t learn about emotions. How to feel them, process them and resolve them. We were taught to put them to the side, distract or ignore them. Then we started to use food as a way to distract but the reality is that eating does not take away or solve the emotion it only pushes it down.
When we create this coping mechanism from a young age (usually) it becomes a pattern. Our brain loves patterns because they are efficient. In this case when we don’t feel good we good to food.
We need a new way
We need a new way to deal with our emotions. Scratch that – we need to be with our emotions as we were meant to be with them. Emotions are biochemicals we produce in response to an experience. They give us information and insights.
If we don’t move thorough the emotions without distraction we don’t get the information from it and the emotion remains in the body. This is what trauma is, unresolved emotions stuck in the body. It doesn’t have to be an obvious trauma.
This unresolved emotion gets triggered again and again and then we go to food to cope and feel better. And that is how emotional eating intertwines with food.
How do we resolve this pattern?
We need to access this pattern by learning how to feel safe in our body with these emotions. Because these emotions are stuck in the body we need a process that gets into the body to process and integrate it. I love using somatic meditations with psychotherapy tools because it gets to the root. This is where we are able to resolve this pattern.
We begin to detach food from emotions and begin to have a healthy relationship with both.
When these emotions remain in the body too long they can create digestive issues, pain, tension and stress. This results in a body that doesn’t feel good physically.
When we do this deeper work we start releasing this on a body level which creates a body that feels at ease and good.
This process is part of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program. Emotional eating is multilayered and we cover more about his in the program as well. This multifaceted approach has helped women who have tried everything under the sun because this gets to the deeper layers needed to resolve this pattern.
Once you resolve this pattern at the root you will start to feel at ease and confident in your body and around food.
Invitation – If this is resonating with you, I would love to invite you to book in an Emotional Eating Assessment call to see how the program can support you.
To feeling good,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist + Emotional Eating Expert
