Hello love,
I wanted to share with you why you’re not sabotaging yourself when you emotionally eat. I know it can feel like you are sabotaging yourself. When I talk to women, that’s what they think they’re doing.
They’re sabotaging themselves. Why can’t they just not emotionally eat? Why do they keep sort of sabotaging themselves? And those are the words they use. And it almost feels like that, why can’t I just do this thing?
So when you emotionally eat, it’s not that you’re sabotaging yourself. It’s not that you’re trying to make yourself fail. What you’re doing is using food to cope. Emotional eating is a coping mechanism. It’s when we use food to soothe ourselves from any discomfort, distress or uncomfortable emotions. It’s a way we protect ourselves and manage stress.
While it’s not a healthy way of dealing with stress, it is what we’ve learned and what we’ve developed over time. I was the same way when I was emotionally eating. I felt like I was sabotaging myself. I felt like, why can’t I just make this work? Because I didn’t understand what was really going on.
I didn’t understand how powerful this coping mechanism was. I thought I just needed more willpower, and I just needed to push through. For some reason, I just wasn’t designed the same way as everyone else. I thought something was wrong with me. But now, knowing what I know about emotional eating, this is so far from what’s going on, because emotional eating is a coping mechanism.
The pattern
What I see with clients is that this pattern was formed in childhood. It’s not that you were sitting around with all of these chips and cookies emotionally eating. This pattern formed in childhood because you didn’t have certain needs met. You weren’t regulated by your parents or caregivers. We weren’t given what you developmentally needed to have a healthier way of being in life. So you had to develop ways of just managing the stressors and coping.
Coping is not about resolution or thriving. It’s about survival. We really have to think about this pattern as being repeated again and again becoming automatic. Our brain loves efficiency, so it becomes subconscious.
It becomes a program we run whenever we’re triggered. We go to food to soothe ourselves. It can feel like we’re sabotaging ourselves, like something is taking us over.
What’s happening?
If we think about our mind as 100%, our conscious mind is about 5% and our subconscious mind is about 95%. The part of us that’s triggered into emotional eating is subconscious and it’s powerful because it’s holding 95% power.
That subconscious part of us also runs our heart beating, our lungs breathing. If you learn to drive a car it’s the part of you that just gets in the car and you end up from point A to point B without even remembering it.
Now we’re trying to use 5% to shift 95% which isn’t efficient at all and it leaves us feeling like a failure and something’s wrong with us. We need to dive deeper in order to resolve this.
So what I’ve found through my own journey and working with clients is that we need to be “smart” about this pattern and look at it in a multilayered way.
It’s not only that we shift the emotional eating pattern, we have to learn how to meet our needs and create structures around it.
What a lot of programs do is give you a laundry list of what needs you may have and it is not tapping into your essence and true needs.
It’s on a conscious level, it’s not getting into the subconscious. We need to have awareness of what’s really going on.
The 3 Keys
What I found working with this is that there are 3 key areas that are impacted by our emotional eating and that can trigger it. It’s around our relationship to food, to our body and to our emotions.
We’re using diets, restriction and exercise to achieve a certain body to “get” certain needs met. Maybe we feel we’ll have the acceptance, validation and approval we desire. We would have needed this developmentally and if we didn’t have them we try to manipulate or do things to get those needs met.
What happens is we are emotionally eating. We feel out of control with food in our body so we use diets and exercise to manage that. We were probably were shamed around our emotions and expressing them. So we try to manage that or numb that, bypass that with food.
The way out of this is to stop being restrictive around food, stop punishing our body and stop bypassing our emotions. The way we’ve been dealing with this pattern is putting us into a state that will trigger the pattern even more.
When we’re in fight or flight, when we’re in a stress state, it triggers the pattern. That’s how we’re triggered into our emotional eating.
So with food we need to shift to a way where we’re nourishing our body and connecting to our actual body’s nourishment needs. From this we can start seeing where we’re actually triggered into our emotional eating.
We need to start shifting to honour our body’s rhythms and needs so that we’re no longer triggering emotional eating.
We need to process, resolve and integrate the emotions and create a new powerful way forward that meets our true needs.
Shifting from the root
So as we shift this pattern in these 3 areas we start shifting our emotional eating from the root. As we do this we naturally start feeling at ease in our body and around food. We’re no longer in a stressful state which makes our body feel contracted and tight which turns on disease, stress and weight gain.
We’re shifting to a way of being at ease which is rest and digest. Our body starts feeling peace and ease. Health is turned on, we release excess weight and we are energized. This is how we shift the pattern.
We’re no longer going to be triggered into emotional eating because we’re resolving the root issues and the root patterns and beliefs that go along with this.
The way we do that is to relate to food, our body and our emotions in a healthier way. Then we do the deeper work to shift the pattern. On a deeper level we resolve the traumas that are there and move forward in a powerful way because we’ve now created a new way of being.
This is why you’re not sabotaging yourself, because these patterns were created to help us cope and to survive. Now, though, we’re going to shift to thriving.
All of this we do inside of The Emotional Eating Evolution Program with a step by step process, support, accountability, and somatic meditations to shift this pattern at the root so you can finally feel at ease and confident in your body and around food. Find out more about the program HERE.
To thriving,
Michelle
Certified Holistic Nutritionist Specializing in Emotional Eating
