Is it time to go Beyond Emotional Eating?
It's time for a personal share, I wanted to tell you a bit about me and my own journey…
This piece is about emotional eating, so if this is something that you are interested in exploring, read on!
Recently I was asked by my dear friend and colleague to pen an article about how we can sabotage ourselves with food and struggles with emotional eating.
This really struck a chord with me as food, weight, body image and the train wreck it has had on my self esteem over the years has been profound.
I wonder what beliefs your younger self formed about your appearance, self-worth, belonging, and what was acceptable?
I wonder if those beliefs serve you now?
It can take time, effort and lots of healing to debunk those beliefs.
And so, looking at me now, you might think, "Well, Rebecca, you're a slim person. You look healthy. You look energetic. And I am. I lead a very active and healthy life, and even though I'm nearly 50, weight is not my problem now.
But what I really want you to know is...
Darling, I have been there too. I have walked this road. And if you need me, I'm here to walk it with you.
Supporting people on their weight-loss journey - and ultimately how you pave the way to self-esteem - has always been something close to my heart.
I believe we all have our solutions within us, but we sometimes need some support to really know, feel and realise what is holding us back in our lives.
One area of speciality which I’m deeply passionate about is helping people with emotional eating and the self sabotage that can happen despite your best intentions, hopes and desires.
If you’ve been in the habit of Emotional Eating it’s likely you’ve been in a spiral of emotions surrounding your food without the skills necessary for effective emotional processing
It can feel easier sometimes to focus on our habits and goals than to get close to the suppressed emotions surrounding our relationship with food.
Shining a light on this part of our relationship with food can be confronting, vulnerable and uncomfortable than our previous areas.
I understand this.
You might be using food to suppress your emotions
Emotional eating can become something that we do as a way of masking or suppressing underlying emotions and feelings, such as some kind of pain, trauma, and abandonment that we haven't felt safe to, or had the support and tools to process.
When these emotions start to bubble up closer to the surface, you might start to use food as a way of distracting ourselves and soothing ourselves trying to ensure that these emotions do not come to the surface.
The trouble when we suppress our emotions, it is like trying to keep a beach ball underwater. We can’t keep it under there for long before it bounces back - sometimes hitting us in the face!
It’s here we find ourselves going to even greater lengths to numb our pain and discomfort for longer and the action can become addictive.
When we are under stress or feeling overwhelmed for example, we can have a tendency to make food choices that may give us a temporary reprieve from feeling these uncomfortable emotions.
I think you already know that this doesn't fix the situation, or quell the pain for long. In fact, it often has a tendency to spiral, make us continue the behaviour and produce more guilt and shame.
Every time we use food to quell the thoughts, feelings and emotions around the particular “stressor” we are actually in disconnection with our own body, and what our body is asking for, and so eating becomes removed from nourishment and nutrition.
Food becomes a metaphor for how we deal with stress, pain and anxiety
It’s not your fault. We have been conditioned to associate food with emotional ties and it has many layers of meaning in our psyche.
Food can be…
Nourishment and life
Quenche an emptiness by filling you with something
Gives your body a dose of natural calming drugs
It’s these reasons that food gets mixed up with themes like “worthiness” “emptiness” and “longing” and becomes metaphorically tied to nourishing ourselves, receiving love.
We might be eating chocolate when we really need something sweet through connection.
We might be still feeding the part of us that is a young child who never had enough.
We might be hooked on activating our “pleasure centres” in our brain through refined carbohydrates, when what we really need is to feel better about our marriage.
During times that we are eating unconsciously, or compulsively only to experience regret, guilt, weight gain and digestive issues we are trying to service a part of ourselves that needs attention with the best way we know how - food.
Ultimately, when we are in the grips of the emotional eating cycle and then the effects it has on our body, we get to say that our body is the problem and it gives us something in our control - without actually confronting the source of our anxiety.
It allows our pain to morph into something we can see.
Otherwise it’s just terrifying and overwhelming and “in you” with no route to get out.
If you didn’t have a voice for pain or have any access to understanding it growing up, then it is very possible you suppress it and turned it on yourself via food.
So I can hear you asking, if that’s how I got here, what now?
Firstly, I want to acknowledge that it can be really painful to confront all these layers we have been unpacking. It is normal and justified to feel lots of different emotions from anger to fear, sadness and grief.
If you can, try and take a deep breath of self compassion in this moment and send some love and grace to the parts of you that the emotional eating were trying to soothe and protect.
Your critical voice has had a lot of airplay for a long time and I’m here to give you permission to let it take a rest.
Moving into a mindset where where you value self-care, treating your body as a beautiful and faithful servant of your soul, is to be brave enough to examine what you're trying to fill with food, because it's not actual hunger.
My online program Becoming Finally Full - A Self-Paced Hypnosis Program for Positive Weight Management is here!
https://rebeccaeather.com/becomingfinallyfull
You’ll actually recieve the bonus module Beyond Emotional Eating whihch works through all of this….You have nothing to lose!
