Hello love,
Today I wanted to share with you how that critical voice in your head is holding you back from resolving your emotional eating.
Something that I see with a lot of women is this critical voice in their head that keeps them from resolving their emotional eating. It’s the voice that doubts them. It’s the voice tells them that they can’t do something. It’s the voice that holds them back from taking action. This voice sounds…critical. And we might not always “hear” it.
It can be resistance. It can be that sabotaging voice in your head. One thing is sure – it doesn’t make us feel good.
When we are feeling good and moving in the right direction, it’s going to be easy to take action steps. It’s going to be easy for us to be who we are.
But this voice, it sounds really critical. In a way, most of us have this voice.
Where this voice comes from
It comes from our parents, our caregivers, society. It comes from different things we learn as we’re growing up.
For a lot of emotional eaters, this critical voice, you might not always hear it but you feel it. It is the voice that is not allowing you to move through your emotions, it’s the one punishing you, making you feel like you have to go after something to feel accepted or loved. I see this pattern with women all the time.
That critical voice is telling you your body doesn’t look the right way, you shouldn’t be eating this way, you ate too much. These types of comments come out of my clients mouths like it’s their truth.
But it’s not true because it’s not kind or loving.
It’s like a critical parent. It’s like a punishing parent. It’s like someone that’s so awful and the person that’s awful is you inside of your head.
When we live with this voice and we stay in this old way of punishing ourselves and restricting ourselves, we don’t recognize what it’s doing to our body. We keep trying to whip ourselves into a better shape, into better patterns.
The thing is, this voice, it’s so deeply ingrained. It now just feels like it’s a part of us because it’s been there for most of our lives.
We weren’t born flawed + Health
So what I want to say is that when we come into this world, we didn’t come into this world imperfect. We came into this world perfect. We came into this world whole. We needed our parents and caregivers to take care of us, to model to us how to take care of ourselves, to be kind to us, to be loving to us so that we could grow in a healthy way.
I’m going to just clarify when I use the word healthy and unhealthy, I think they can be really ambiguous. I want you to use your body to discern the difference between healthy and unhealthy.
In our body, when our body is in a state of health, our body is going to be in a calmer nervous system. We’re going to feel more ease, more peace. Our mind is not going to be on hyper alert or in survival mode. It’s going to be in a calm state.
When our body is biologically turned on for health so we are going to digest better, we’re going to have better hormonal balance, all of the things. We’re going to release weight, we’re not going to store weight. Our immune system is going to function optimally. This is all data, this is science.
Unhealthy state…
When we’re in an unhealthy state, it is the opposite.
We’re in survival mode that turns on thoughts of survival and whatever triggers that.
When you’re an emotional eater, when you’re restricting food, you’re punishing your body, you’re suppressing your emotions, you’re telling yourself you’re not good enough. “You should”…that turns on the stress response. That means we’re in fight or flight. That means we’re in survival mode. That means that our digestion is going to be off, our moods are going to be off, we’re going to have more triggers.
We are in a state of disease versus ease. So we’re in a state where our immune system function is going to be depleted, we’re going to store fat, our hormones are going to be out of whack.
We want to be in a calm nervous system 80 or 90% of the time. We don’t want to be in a chronic stress state.
We’re not meant to be in a stress state. Stress states are just meant for emergencies and those growth edges. It’s not something we’re supposed to chronically be in. Otherwise we’re constantly depleting our body.
As emotional eaters, when we have this diet mentality, when we’re constantly obsessing about food, this is a 24/7 thing, so it’s chronic.
This puts us into this unhealthy state, this survival mode. When we’re in survival mode, it turns on more of these critical thoughts. This survival mode didn’t just happen yesterday.
It comes from us creating this emotional eating pattern. From lacking the modelling and regulation we developmentally needed to move through discomfort. This is where this pattern originates.
It becomes a way we live, or really survive. Emotional eating, whenever we’re triggered, we go to food to soothe ourselves, to numb ourselves, so our nervous system can calm down and regulate.
BUT it is not a healthy way of doing that. It’s still coping.
We can’t have a perfect life where nothing happens. We’re meant to have these little ups and downs, but when we’re chronically in this coping pattern we don’t fully resolve events. How could we, we weren’t given the tools. So these events live in our body. The pattern keeps growing and growing.
Then we layer on the criticisms of society around food. It says something’s wrong with the way you eat, something’s wrong with your body. Then we think, yeah, if I could do that then I’d be accepted because I’m still looking for this acceptance and feeling okay. “If only I look this way, if only I could control, then finally I’d be okay. If I can control my dinner, I’ll be okay, I’ll be accepted. If I can just be at that weight and lose those ten pounds, then I’ll be okay.”
What we don’t see is that that frantic thought pattern is creating more of what we don’t want. Because we’re going into fight or flight mode, we’re going into survival mode in our body, which turns on disease, weight gain, digestive issues, critical thoughts. We’re constantly feeding this part of us.
Shifting to a new way
So we need to shift to a new way. And that takes a little bit of a leap of faith. We start slowly implementing a new way of being, we start calming down our nervous system.
When we shift from restriction in food to nourishing our body, that’s going to shift us and we start seeing where we’re actually triggered because we can be triggered into emotional eating when we are restricting ourselves which triggers those critical thoughts around food.
We also move from punishment to acceptance of our body. We start working with those deeper traumas, those unresolved emotions that live in our body. When we’re able to get to those deeper layers at the root, we clear this pattern at the root.
When we get to the truth of that, we come back to that innocence. When we were born, nothing was wrong with us. We don’t need to “change”, we don’t need to be something else to be accepted. What we’ve done is we’ve chased all of these things. We’ve had to cope.
Then we add on these other patterns with diet, mentality and body image issues, which put us more into this survival mode, which makes our body unhealthy. Then we’re trying to fix it with more of the same critical mindset and restrictive solutions like diets, surgeries, pill, etc, which makes zero sense.
It’s that quote I shared before, Einstein’s quote of doing the same thing, expecting a different result. That’s the definition of insanity. So we keep punishing ourselves and being critical and we keep pushing ourselves and we’re in this survival mode and we might get a short term result, but in the long run do more damage.
We need to shift to thriving. We need to shift to calm and ease so that we turn our body on for rest and digest, for health.
We need to go through these layers where we’re shifting the way we look at food, the types of foods that we’re eating, we’re shifting the way we relate to our body and honouring it. And we’re doing that deeper work on where these unresolved emotions live in the body so that we can clear it, clear those thoughts.
Then we’re going to be more at ease. We’re going to align back to ourselves, which is in a state of health, which is a calm state, a state of ease. It’s going to open up our perception and the way we look at the world, because it’s in this calm state that we’re going to grow and open our prefrontal cortex. We’re going to see more clearly, we’re going to have better ideas. Because we’re not in survival. We are thriving.
Make the jump
You feel like they’re a part of you because you’ve been living in them for so long and you need to really see that feeling. Ease and peace and calm is your natural state. That’s a hard jump when you’ve been living in the survival state for so long. I see this time and time again with clients. They start tangibly, seeing and feeling in their body that ease and how they’ve been in sort of this rat race.
You can actually get the results you want when you’re in a calmer state and you’re going to have more capacity for it as well.
In The Emotional Eating Evolution Program, this is what we work on. Shifting you from the survival state to thriving. To truly nourishing your body, to truly accepting your body and to moving through those uncomfortable emotions. Resolving them at the root level in the body so that can finally feel at ease, free and confident around food and in your body.
Find out more about The Emotional Eating Evolution Program Here.
To thriving,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist Specializing in Emotional Eating
