Emotional eating
The feeling of self sabotage is real, and often fuels the next session.
Emotional eating. We have all been there, and it’s a cycle of eating, feeling bad, feeling shame, and then eating again for comfort. Around and around we go. I have always been relatively slim, however emotional eating is just as real for me as someone else and leads to feelings of self loathing and disappointment. The feeling of self-sabotage is real, and often it fuels the next session of emotional eating.
I suspect that comfort eating is a reward to ourselves, in an age where we don’t really have much time to care for ourselves. Women in particular are always caring for others and also trying to stay ahead at work, so there isn’t much time for self-care and kindness. And that chocolate block makes us feel good for a while… or the extra glass of wine…
It can attack at any time and really has nothing to do with actual hunger. We are trying to ‘eat our emotions’, but this doesn’t work. The food and emotion is just stored away as either toxic fat or toxic thoughts. We crave sugar because it stimulates our brain the same way that a pleasure inducing drug does, and we crave it to make us feel better. This is all well and good, but it is a band aid approach and does not fix the problem- rather this approach adds to it problem, with feelings of failure from comfort eating.
We need to accept that its ok to feel emotions- even anger, fear, and sadness. Treat your feelings with kindness rather than shutting them out. Listen to your emotions and learn from them, and then intuitively the body will understand that we don’t need to comfort eat to protect ourselves. We don’t need to get a relief from the discomfort of negative emotions, as they are just that.. emotions. By listening and exploring our emotions we can work out what we really need for happiness, rather than ignoring them, hoping they go away. Unexpressed feelings often rear their head via emotional eating. These could be feelings that track right back to childhood, and may include abandonment, betrayal, anger, shame, or unworthiness.
We learn from a young age to avoid things that make us feel bad. We use all kinds of strategies to escape dealing with our emotions and cover up how we feel. Without the ability to cope with life’s inevitable hard and painful feelings we leave ourselves open to using food (and sometimes other dangerous substances) to cope. Practice letting yourself experience difficult feelings. Although feeling angry, sad, hurt etc, doesn't change the situation or fix anything, neither does ignoring those feelings and covering them up with behaviours that you really want to stop.
Self-care is vital. Emotional eating provides pleasure, but there are other ways of getting the self-care and pleasure that we crave. Take a walk on the beach, or a luxurious bubble bath. Book a massage, or a nice healthy gourmet dinner that you can saviour. Stock your fridge and pantry with healthy foods that will nourish your body and give you the health that you deserve. Do some research on how to care for your body, and believe that changing the behaviour of emotional eating will improve your quality of life- because it will.
If the urge to binge becomes overwhelming and you need to 'comfort eat' then focus on eating slowly and savour each mouthful. Pause for a minute or two before you eat and think about the process of getting that food into your hands. Contemplate where it has come from, and how it was made. Silently express your gratitude that you can enjoy the food that you are using to comfort yourself while you are feeling low. Draw all of your senses into eating- taste, aroma, sight and focus on the different flavours. Think about if the food you are eating is actually nourishing your body.
But most importantly we need to stop ‘beating ourselves up’ for eating our emotions, and observe our emotions with compassion. There is no point fighting it, but rather observe the emotional eating with curiosity- with a desire to let the unexpressed emotions leave, so that your relationship with life-giving, health promoting food can be restored.
