Hello love,
Something I see time and time again with women I speak to and even clients is an avoidant pattern of resolving their emotional eating.
Part of the reason that avoidance is a huge issue is because they have been using their emotional eating to avoid many things. To dive into the pattern it feels like too much. That it will be overwhelming
We’re also used to those “quick” fixes in an effort to get rid of our emotional eating. To avoid dealing with it. We don’t want to go deeper and do the deeper work. We’ve been conditioned in society to think that there is a quick fix, a magic bullet, a surgery, a pill – that will just take this away. What that does is keep us on the surface of emotional eating. It keeps us “trying” to manage symptoms and does take us to the deeper root that will create sustainable change and shift this pattern at the core.
How this pattern is created…
This avoidance strategy is what we’ve been doing for a long time. When we are young and we develop this coping mechanism we learn to avoid our emotions and needs. We use food to soothe ourselves from this discomfort.
We don’t do this consciously of course.
As children we can’t move through our emotions and regulate ourselves. Our parents and caregivers were meant to regulate us and model how to be with discomfort. If they are not able to so this we learn to cope. Most likely they were not able to regulate themselves and weren’t modelled this either.
Society Reinforces this
As a society we promote avoidance. We avoid emotions and we avoid ourselves. We are only told to look at the surface symptoms and not how to get to the deeper root.
This keeps us in the loop that something is wrong with us and we need the next new thing to”fix” ourselves.
We are sold we are broken.
It’s not about something being wrong with us. It’s about what happened to us.
At the very core and root we weren’t given what we needed in order to develop and move through life. We developed coping not thriving strategies like emotional eating.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to survive. When I was working through my emotional eating I wanted to thrive and I saw women who had the relationship to food and their body I desired.
I knew I had to stop avoiding and go past the surface solutions. I could feel intuitively there was more going on. The more I dug in I saw this pattern’s deeper roots – which usually stem from childhood.
If we’ve been taught to avoid our whole lives, that’s what we’ve been conditioned to do.
What it takes to move past this…
But the truth is that is takes some work, energy, a new way of being to get the results we want. It takes discipline, devotion and commitment. Not avoidance.
And that might sound daunting but that’s what gets us true results. As long as we have the right tools in place to move us forward. I’m not talking about the surface solutions that don’t work no matter how much we commit to them.
So, if something is not shifting for you we need to stop avoiding and go deeper.
What that means is that we are looking at what created this pattern for us so that we have the right tools.
The deeper work
When I work with clients in The Emotional Eating Evolution Program one of the key areas we look at is resolving the trauma and the events that created this pattern. We are getting at the emotions under the emotional eating and resolving it at a deep level in the body where we store trauma.
When we are able to do this we shift into a new way of being that is going to create this healthy relationship to food and our body that we desire.
We are also moving away from the limiting ways we look at food, our body and our emotions. A lot of the times as emotional eaters we fall into the diet trap and body image issue trap. And we pile this on top of our emotional eating. This makes this pattern more convoluted.
Once we resolve the deeper emotional eating pattern we start resolving our issues around food. and we stop looking at the diet mentality and move towards true nourishment which is a deeper connection to food.
We start looking at our body image issues and shifting to body acceptance which is a deeper connection to our body.
As we shift in these areas we truly resolve the emotional eating pattern and we move out of avoidance because we are now directly looking at what we’ve been avoiding.
Where your power is
There is so much power in looking at what you’ve been avoiding. There is a sense of “YES, I’m finally facing this!” and when you do that there is a shift inside of you.
You are taking responsibility to do this deeper work and see that this pattern goes back to childhood.
You can take responsibility and move through the grief and anger that you’ve stored for not having your needs met, of not being able to move forward and have a healthy relationship to yourself, you body and to food.
Avoidance is the old way of doing things. This doesn’t mean just jumping in but having the right support, guidance and step-by-step plan to move through this pattern.
For my clients when they move through The Emotional Eating Evolution Program we can see where the resistance and blocks arise and help them navigate it. The journey is not linear but there is growth even though there are ups and downs.
It might not always feel good but overall you get a deeper sense of ease and confidence in your body and around food.
I hope what I shared with you lets you see that avoidance is not the way forward. We need to face what is going on and get to the deeper root to create true resolution.
If you are resonating with what I’ve shred and are ready to resolve your emotional eating you can find out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program here or apply + book in an assessment call to chat about your goals, where you are at and how we can support you.
To progress,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist + Emotional Eating Expert
