Hello love,
If you’ve ever found yourself thinking this about your emotional eating:
“Why can’t I stop going to food?”
“Why do I feel so out of control?”
“Why do I keep it together in other areas of my life?
But food just takes me over and I spiral and I just can’t seem to get a handle on it?”
And you’ve tried the diets, the personal trainers, the willpower, and it doesn’t seem to work for your emotional eating – you’re not broken, you’re not weak. This is not a willpower issue.
What no one explained to me was that this pattern goes so much deeper.
It’s about your relationship to your body, to your emotions, to yourself.
Today I want to explain to you why you feel so out of control with food, what’s really running this pattern, why trying harder hasn’t worked and how to resolve it. Because you’ve probably tried everything.
This can be confusing to you if you’re an ambitious woman. Maybe on the outside, it looks like you have everything together. You’re going after your goals, your ambitions but on the inside, you’re struggling with food.
You think everybody else seems okay around food and think “Why can’t I just do the same thing?” I get it. That was me too. On the outside, it looked like I was doing all of the right things. I was a chemist, then I went into teaching, I was doing all of the right things on the outside, but on the inside, I was struggling with food, with my body and with so much more.
I tried diets on my own and eventually tried professional help. I had a personal trainer, I went to therapy, I saw a nutritionist and a chiropractor. I was trying all these things, and nothing seemed to move the needle with my emotional eating.
Not one practitioner sat me down and explained to me that I was an emotional eater, never mind explain what the pattern looks like. My therapist even handed me a diet book, the South Beach Diet, and that was one of the last straws. No one seemed to understand what was going on for me.
So I would swing from restriction to emotional eating, and I couldn’t get out of the loop. One of the last times I kind of swung to not caring and just throwing away all restrictions, I hit a big rock bottom.
After almost two years in therapy, seeing a nutritionist and a chiropractor, and having gone to personal training, I wasn’t any further ahead in my emotional eating journey and I just needed a change. I needed to shift my life because it just felt like I was wearing this heavy coat of shame and I wasn’t getting ahead.
All the times that I would emotionally eat and feel out of control with food followed me around day in and day out, at every meal, at every interaction. I was feeling the weight of this and the shame and it was breaking me. I needed to change something.
Let’s dive in:
- 2:49 Moving to Korea for a fresh start but ending up deeper in the emotional eating spiral. Rock bottom to aha.
- 4:14 Food really isn’t the issue? Learning I was coping.
- 5:39 You’re not gaining weight to feel safe. What’s really going on with safety.
- 8:18 My own lived experience in figuring out what was happening, connecting the dots to emotions, trauma and emotional eating.
- 9:40 The brain loves to make things automatic – which makes them subconscious (and powerful).
- 10:38 “I had an ok childhood”. Trauma is on a spectrum and my clients who had “ok” childhoods also use food to soothe.
- 12:27 Why willpower and distraction fail.
- 14:44 The framework to shift your emotional eating.
- 18:05 This journey is not a quick fix, but the upfront effort leads to ease.
- 20:00 Free resources and program details
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 clarity,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist Specializing in Emotional Eating
