Home Archive by category 'Emotional Eating' (Page 2)

Emotional Eating

  • Blogvember, Emotional Eating, Intuitive Eating, Recovery

    27 – Giving up emotional eating is not all or nothing – Backwards is always an option

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    Stepping on the path to stop emotional eating can feel like an absolutely ginormous leap into the unknown. A massive step filled with hesitancy and fear.

    To stop emotional eating means relinquishing the control we believe we have over ourselves, our bodies and our food. It means letting go of the reins we hold on to so tightly in order to get our lives and our bodies to look or feel a certain way.

    Emotional eating is eating in a way which has nothing to do with our physical hunger or physical needs. It is not all bad (!), neither is it all binge eating. The problem is that we so often eat unconsciously, in line with work schedules, kids schedules, the latest fad diet, that we have lost the ability to actually eat in alignment with our bodies and our natural physical needs. We’re dieting, bingeing, fasting, detoxing but without any real clue as to how this is affecting our bodies and what it is really doing to us or for us. We are so out of touch with our own physical needs that our eating patterns have become fabricated by the mind.

    When we eat in line with a certain strategy and forgo listening to our bodies we are giving all the control to our mind. This is when emotional eating happens. Instead of eating when we feel hungry and stopping when we feel full our minds give us other instructions, like ‘you must eat 1 banana for breakfast at 7am’. These instructions or rules are usually pretty random and are generated from years of conditioning by our parents, friends, diet books, celebrities…you get the idea. They are not normally based on our physical needs and wants. The problem with this type of eating with our minds rather than our bodies is that we create other rules with our minds that have nothing to do with using food for nourishment like ‘I eat ice-cream when I’m sad’.

    Because we already know food tastes good, our mind conjures up ways to use that to our advantage for hiding from emotions we don’t want to feel.

    So our mind is controlling when and how we eat and not our bodies, which is the thing that actually should be in control of how and what we eat.

    Stopping emotional eating means letting this go.

    It feels tough because we live in our minds for pretty much our whole lives.

    To let go of that control takes courage. It often feels like too big a leap for most people.

    But the amazing thing is you can actually try before you buy.

    You can try letting go of control slowly, maybe for a day or two. If it’s too much, if you can’t handle it, if a barrage of emotions fly at you and you simply can’t deal then you can let your mind get back in the driving seat. We always forget this when it comes to scary decisions. We think that it is all or nothing, or we convince ourselves that once you move forward you can never go back. But luckily life knows that is not a great plan for success. So often in life we take a step and then keep moving forward on a path that is not meant for us simply because we have this belief we can’t move backwards.

    Well guess what, you absolutely can. And when it comes to relinquishing control over our eating habits slowly but surely is the best way.

    The path to food freedom is rarely a straight line, you will find you go back on yourself, ‘slip-up’ or take a wrong-turn multiple times. The beautiful thing is you can start again at any time. This is your personal journey and it will be exactly what it is.

    If you find yourself failing more than you’re succeeding it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily doing anything wrong but it could mean you’d really benefit from a little nudge in the right direction. If you’ve tried on your own to break out of your emotional eating patterns and can’t quite seem to hack it please get in touch and let’s figure this out together, drop me an email here

    Lots of love xxx

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  • Binge Eating, Blogvember, Dieting, Emotional Eating, Recovery, Self Confidence, Self Love

    25 – How to feel what you feel when eating when you’re NOT eating

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    I hope this title was cryptic enough…

    The reason so many of us turn to food is because it gives us pleasure, it gives us satisfaction, soothes us, comforts us or otherwise makes us feel a certain way. We use food to bring up a particular sensation. We want food to heal us, to take away our pain, to stop us feeling something or to get us to feel anything. We binge and we restrict all to change how we are feeling.

    Whatever method we choose what we are really searching for is that ‘ahhh’ moment when all of our worries and stresses slip away. When we feel that calm, peaceful wave move through our body. Where time seems to stop and we are not here any more. We are enveloped in that warm, comfortable place where nothing can touch us or hurt us. We feel safe, we feel supported. We feel secure and for that tiny fleeting moment we feel loved and accepted.

    This is the feeling we go searching for when we sit down to binge, or when we embark on a new punishingly restrictive diet. That feeling of undeniable acceptance. That moment where we are ok. We spend our days feeling like we are not good enough, not acceptable, too much of this or not enough of that. We crave some peace, so we go looking for it in food or in punishing ourselves through food.

    What if you could feel that peace, that safety, that security all the time? What if in every moment of every day, whatever you were doing, wherever you were going, you were able to feel secure, accepted, supported, comforted? What if you were able to have all that without manipulating your food or exercise? What if you were able to have all that while eating exactly what you wanted whenever you wanted?

    I’m here to tell you that you absolutely can.

    In fact the only thing that is stopping you from having that inner peace is the battle you are currently in with food and your body.

    The very thing that stops us from having peace is ourselves. We are the masters of torturing ourselves. We criticise, chastise and compare ourselves negatively to those around us, those online (more on how to stop that here). We are just straight unkind to ourselves. We starve ourselves or stuff ourselves to make us feel like somehow we fit into this imaginary box some ‘society’ out there has created.

    This does not need to be the case. The reality is there is no-one out there putting you in a box apart from you. Every single person is totally unique and different. There really is no ‘box’ that we need to get in. There simply can’t be because what the hell would that box look like?

    The only person you need to be like is yourself. And guess what, you already are that.

    We don’t need to ‘try’, we don’t need to force or battle or change to be more ourselves. We simply are. As soon as we realise that we instantly get that ‘ahh’ moment. Suddenly we relax when we realise that all we need to be and all we are is who we are right now. You do not need to change for anybody, for any rules, for any reason. Who you are deep inside is absolutely perfect.

    The hard part is getting to believe that though, right?…well here is the only tip you need.

    The only way to see that is for us to open ourselves to the possibility of not trying to be someone different.

    Stop searching for that ‘ahh’ moment in food or in punishment and instead let go and relax in the gloriousness that is you exactly as you are.

    If this speaks to you and you are right there with me that this is the answer and you just need a little help to get there then book in a completely free clarity session with me where we discuss where you’re at right now and give you a strategy to get to work on right away. Just drop me an email now – what are you waiting for?

    Lots of love xx

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  • Blogvember, Body Image, Dieting, Emotional Eating, Intuitive Eating, Recovery, Restriction

    24 – Find Flexibility – Find Food Freedom

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    A huge shift has taken place in the diet/health industry. People have woken up to the fact that being skinny does not necessarily equate to being happy and healthy, that fat loss is not the be all and end all. Size zero is definitely not as ‘in’ as it once was.

    However this has given rise to a new obsession with finding what ‘healthy’ really is. In comes the race to find the most super superfood, the ‘best’ balance of macro and micronutrients, the best time to eat. It’s not just about counting calories anymore. The diet industry is morphing into a health and wellness industry focused on ‘healthy’ eating and with that a growing number of us falling into orthorexic tendencies.

    As you know I like to keep this blog pretty practical and personal rather than going into the factual minutiae but for background orthorexia has been defined by NEDA as “an obsession with proper or ‘healthful’ eating”. It is not clinically diagnosable at the time of this blog but it feels like it’s only a matter of time.

    Not only is there a general push towards finding the ‘healthiest’ diet people have also become more conscious of the environmental implications of the food industry. This has led to a shift towards more people choosing veganism and claiming that it is the healthiest way to eat not only for your body but for the planet as well.

    As a coach supporting absolute food freedom for all I don’t actively support any particular way of eating or trends in the wellness industry. I remain neutral not because I don’t have an opinion but because we are all totally unique and different and therefore what looks and feels like food freedom for me will be different to what looks and feels like food freedom to you.

    I also focus on the emotional basis of our crazy eating habits, binges and fad diets because if we don’t dig deep and look at the real reasons WHY we get so obsessed with particular dogma around food we won’t be able to heal it and find a healthy food freedom that will last a lifetime.

    With this move towards healthy eating now being equated with clean eating, i.e. eating in the most nutrient efficient, unprocessed way, and people getting confused with the all too nebulous term ‘balance’ I want to broaden your minds as to what ‘healthy’ could mean in reality for you.

    Health and balance when it comes to food and your body is not just about what you eat and what you look like, it’s not even just about what you feel like. Having a healthy and balanced relationship with food and your body means eating in a way that not only feels good to you and your body but that also slots into your life with the proper priority level.

    Eating well and caring for our bodies is super important. I am a huge advocate of taking care of ourselves in every way we can so that we can show up in the world and give our true and best selves. However sometimes this doesn’t look like waking up naturally at 7am sipping on a lemon water and eating overnight oats then eating our carefully planned, prepped meals every 2-3 hours.

    Sometimes this means getting up super early in the morning to go and pick our family up from the airport, grabbing a coffee and croissant there even though we know that’s not the best for our energy levels, spending the day running around doing chores to get ready for a work event, having an impromptu pizza lunch date, then collapsing onto the sofa with random leftovers we have put together from our fridge.

    Even though that day didn’t look like a perfect ‘healthy eating’ day, we still fuelled ourselves, we were able to get on with what we wanted to do that day and we showed up in our lives without letting the food options available stop us.

    The magic thing is that after a few days like this, if you are truly seeking health and balance and are able to listen to your body, it will naturally start craving more variety, more fresh foods, different proteins and vegetables. You will find yourself reaching for different foods if your follow your body’s intuition. You don’t need to reverse engineer or restrict your daily activities thinking that you need to eat in a certain perfect way to be healthy. Your body is constantly working on the subconscious level to keep you alive and healthy. When you start allowing your mind to dictate everything you are actually fighting against your body. When you are trying to second-guess what your body needs all the time you are trying to predict the future.

    The only way to find food freedom and be healthy is to listen to your body in the moment. To be aware and use your knowledge to support the choices you are making but not to be bound by this knowledge if your day does not go exactly to plan.

    I encourage you before you say no to things because of the food options available to remember that your body is an incredible, amazing thing that is able to self-regulate and is always looking to bring you back to balance. Knowing what is healthiest for your own body doesn’t mean you have to be dogmatic about sticking to those exact things.

    Life is really just about how well we can adapt to constant change, you’ve heard it before and I will say it again, the only thing we can be certain of in this life is uncertainty!

    Be careful when you are saying no to things because of food choices that you are not actually saying no to life.

    If this resonated check out this blog on how to cope with body change; this one on change in our daily food requirements;
    and this one on finding freedom outside of control

    Lots of love xxx

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  • Blogvember, Dieting, Emotional Eating, Intuitive Eating

    21 – Find your optimal way of eating – three simple steps

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    What is your optimal way of eating?

    This is one of my favourite most frequently asked questions, but also one of the toughest to answer.

    This is because there really is no answer.

    The honest truth is that there is no single optimal way of eating that will suit everybody. Each person is an individual, completely unique and therefore the way of eating that is optimal for them is going to be totally unique and individual to them. Not only that but for each of us our optimal way of eating is going to change depending on what our life situation is, for example how our general health is, what type of work we are doing, our stress levels etc.

    This makes this question tough to answer.
    However there are some things we can do to help us discover what our personal optimal way of eating is.

    1. Listen to your body

    This is absolutely key for all areas of our lives but in particular when it comes to how we eat. Really take time to sit with yourself and your body and take notice of how it feels when you eat certain things at certain times and in certain ways. Your body is amazing, it will give you signals over and over again about what it likes and what it needs. It will also tell you when it doesn’t like something, for example if you have a minor intolerance you might get itchy eyes or a swollen mouth. If you can do this off the bat you will have a great chance of finding your optimal way of eating.

    2. Experiment – try new things

    If you are not sure how to read the messages from your body then start experimenting. Eat different mixes of foods for breakfast and see how your energy changes through the day, eat at different times and different quantities. Try raw food and cooked food, meat and meat-free. Mix and match as much as you can but stay consistent over the course of at least a week before changing to see how your body responds. Your energy levels and feelings of vitality should respond to how you are eating. You know when you have spent the weekend eating a tonne of junk food and drinking heavily, you feel crappy and lethargic right? You can easily see the effect this food and drink has had on you. This is what we are trying to see through experimentation, what foods make us feel great and what foods don’t feel good to us.

    3. Just do you – don’t get sucked into someone else’s way of eating

    Now this is a bit of a trick one – what I’m saying is don’t fall for fad diets or dogma. Don’t fall for quick fixes or superfood diets. Yes there are more nutrient dense foods out there and less nutritionally valuable foods BUT finding your optimal way of eating doesn’t necessarily mean how many superfoods can you pack into a smoothie, or never eating anything with sugar again. Don’t be fooled by dogma. There is no right or wrong when it comes to your way of eating. Your optimal way of eating for your health, vitality and life is yours and yours alone so don’t let anyone tell you how you should or shouldn’t eat.

    There really is no right or wrong, your body will tell you how it feels best. If you are not sure what feeling good in your body is or feels like then please get in touch. This is one of the key struggles my clients face when trying to stop emotional eating and find their optimal way of eating. Drop me a comment below or send me an email sasha@sashafardell.com

    The optimal way of eating for you is the way you feel happiest, healthiest and most full of life, and that is something only you can truly know.

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  • Blogvember, Body Image, Emotional Eating, Intuitive Eating, Recovery, Self Love

    20 – Nourish yourself with Self-Care – Three Tools

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    A lot of what we speak about when we look at the topic of self-love and self-acceptance is all the ways we can best take care of ourselves mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually in this life so that we can show up as our best selves and do the things we want to do.

    When we are abusing food and our bodies through extreme emotional eating, dieting or punishing exercise routines we are not taking care of ourselves. Not only when it comes to food and exercise but likely in many other ways as well.

    Some people might like to argue that controlling their food or exercising all the time is healthy for them. I’m not going to dispute that, for example if you are a competitive athlete than living your best, most full up life will likely involve a pretty strict diet and exercise regime. However for most of us to live our best lives we could probably do with being a little kinder to ourselves.

    In this blog post I want to share some of the ways you can heal your relationship with food and your body and yourself without actually focusing on changing the way you eat and move.

    Let me explain. Often when something goes wrong we try to figure out the solution by focusing on fixing the thing that is broken, for example if your knee is hurting then normally we contain our problem-solving to different things that could have gone wrong with the knee. But we miss the fact that even though the knee is the site of the pain it might actually be our hip or shoulder or neck that is out of line that is causing the knee pain in the first place. So perhaps short term we can fix the knee, but long term the problem is likely to return. We haven’t really solved the deeper issue. Do you see where I’m going with this?

    Let’s bring it back to abusing food and exercise.

    Our poor relationship with food and our bodies is normally a symptom of deeper feelings of low self-worth. Focusing on changing how we eat and stopping emotionally eating is just putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. Eating in a more balanced way and exercising differently won’t solve the underlying problem. It is unlikely that by just changing your food and exercise regime you will suddenly begin to live this incredible full-up life of your dreams.

    This certainly wasn’t the case for me. I reformed my eating habits and exercise routine (more on me and exercise here), began resting a whole lot and eating a whole lot more nourishing foods, in a more balanced fashion but I still wasn’t really taking care of myself. Not really. The band-aid was firmly on but the bullet wound was not healed. In fact when I realised I was still struggling with so much in my life despite this change in attitude to my food and body, I thought ‘this isn’t working’ so I slipped back in to trying to control my food and the destructive eating and exercise habits came back.

    I needed a longer term solution.

    I needed to find real self-acceptance that came not from changing my food and exercise but from nourishing who I was as a person.

    None of my tips for nourishing yourself are revolutionary and there is actually good reason for this. We are talking about nourishing your human side. Humans have been living on this planet for thousands of years, and yes we have made a hell of a lot of progress in that time but we are still essentially human beings and this is still pretty much the planet we began life on.

    So let’s get in to the list

    1.Nature – Get into Nature

    There is nothing in this world more healing and nourishing for our humans souls than pure connection and nature is one of the most abundant sources of this powerful energy. Parks and gardens are ok but really I am talking about ‘big’ nature – a forest where you can surround yourself with trees, the ocean, a lake, the top of a hill. Any type of nature where you can escape shops, billboards, cars, sirens…you know what I’m saying.
    If you want to feel more at peace with yourself, more supported or held then get into nature.
    A big part of the reason we mess with our food and bodies and don’t love ourselves is because we feel disconnected. We carry around this sense of isolation and loneliness, we feel unloved and unworthy, the feeling that we are not good enough for this world. This disconnected feeling is because we are not in touch with our true selves. Being in nature reminds us of who we really are in the most basic sense. We are living beings, we are alive in the same way birds are alive, the same way trees are alive. Being in nature reminds us of that. When we are reminded of that we feel connected to things outside of ourselves lessening that sense of loneliness and abandonment.
    Maybe you’re not sure what I’m saying here about connection and energy, you don’t need to believe me, just go and spend some time out in nature, switch your phone off, take a look around and then see how you feel after. Chances are you will feel more relaxed, lighter and at ease with yourself. This is the feeling we are after when we talk about nourishing ourselves.

    2. Caring for your body – going back to basics

    Here I am going back to basics, talking about mindful washing of ourselves, the most basic form of self care but that we mostly just do on auto-pilot, we jump in stand there worrying about what we have to do that day, think ‘sh*t, I’m running late’, jump out and get on with our day.
    An amazing way to nourish yourself is to spend this time actually caring for your body. The best thing is that it doesn’t take any extra time because we all regularly shower anyway.
    There is no set routine or way to do this correctly. The point of this is to show our body some care, to focus and give our attention to loving the skin we are in. You don’t need to move into ‘body love’ mode, just focus on the caring act of washing yourself clean. Giving your body a mini fresh start. Its amazing what a mood booster this can be when we wash mindfully. If you find your mind wanders bring it back to the moment by saying to yourself what you are doing, e.g. let your inner voice say ‘washing my feet’ as you are washing your feet.
    If you want to make it into a ritual by having a soak in the bath that’s also an option. But the point here is that actually the small moments where you are acting in an intentionally caring way towards yourself are just as valuable and nourishing as the big gestures!

    3. Give yourself the gift of sleep

    Giving your body some security in terms of sleeping patterns is one of the most caring things you can do for yourself. It’s telling your body that it’s ok to rest. We need to encourage our bodies to shut down. We need to get proper rest otherwise how are we supposed to do everything we want to do in this life? Often we can’t sleep or our sleep is disturbed because of anxiety that is based in fear. When we are fearful or anxious about things our adrenaline is switched on and we are constantly on high alert. Our bodies don’t feel safe to shut down in that state because we are afraid of being attacked or that something will happen where we will have to defend ourselves. Having a regular bed time and a bed time routine, whatever that looks like for you, is vital in reassuring our minds and bodies that it is safe to sleep. Having more restful sleep is absolutely vital to taking care of ourselves.

    We are caring for ourselves when we stop doing as much. Being still and resting in this busy chaotic world is one of the highest forms of self-care there is.

    Please have a go at implementing these tools, and let me know how you get on – just drop a comment below or email me sasha@sashafardell.com. Such simple things practiced over time with patience and consistency are absolutely life-changing.

    Lots of love xx

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  • Anxiety, Blogvember, Emotional Eating, Self Love, Sexual Abuse

    18 – How past trauma is affecting your emotional eating

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    As I’ve said on this blog and will keep saying until we all hear it – emotional eating is an escape. It is a way of not feeling our feelings.

    One of the most common reasons we turn to emotional eating is because of past trauma. It is not within the scope of this blog to dive super deep here, but just know this is a massive topic with loads of research around it and I want you as readers of this blog to just be aware that trauma and emotional eating are very often interrelated.
    I’m not going to go deep into the science but in order to understand why emotional eating or disordered eating patterns are related to trauma we need to be aware of what happens in the body in a traumatic event.

    When we experience trauma, i.e. when we are in a traumatic event or receive a trauma our body is the first thing to respond in order to protect us. You may have heard before of the ‘lizard brain’, that very ancient part of our brain that controls our fight or flight response, this response is the one which kicks in first when we are experiencing trauma.

    In order to protect us, to keep us alive, our body reacts much faster than our mind and it produces a load of hormones, adrenaline, cortisol, and others, that tell our body to either fight, flight or freeze. There is also some literature around a fourth response, fawning, this is in relation to when you receive trauma from a primary caregiver or in a co-dependent relationship. Fawning essentially means that in response to receiving trauma from someone you deem as being vital to survival, rather than fight, flight or freeze you instead move towards them and try to placate them, try to make them happy and essentially get them to stop traumatising you. This happens a lot of the time between children and abusive parental figures or vice versa.

    If in the moment of the trauma our bodies are unable to respond with either fight, flight or freeze in order to protect ourselves, then the trauma gets stuck in our body. In essence the trauma is received by the body and it is unable to process it in the way it wants to therefore the traumatic experience gets trapped.

    If you want to read more on this I highly recommend Bessel van der Kolk’s book ‘The Body Keeps the Score’. Buy it here*

    When we have traumas stuck in our bodies our lizard brain is constantly on high alert telling us to process the trauma (this is where PTSD comes in) and therefore our bodies are swimming in high levels of these hormones being pumped out trying to get us to react and move the trauma through our bodies.

    These hormones are the reason we emotionally eat or adopt erratic eating patterns.

    The hormones mess with our natural bodily functions and signals and therefore we are not getting the normal hunger and fullness signals we should be getting. Instead we are listening to the signals of our body in a heightened state. Cycles of high adrenaline will mean we don’t feel hungry for hours despite being active and not eating. Then as it crashes we will suddenly become starving and start craving a lot of calorie dense food to stop the crash.

    Not dealing with trauma, releasing it and allowing it to pass through our bodies means it is stored and constantly triggered. This upsets our body’s natural rhythms and therefore constantly sends out signals that are very confusing for us to react to.  This gives us the feeling of being totally out of control and of having an unpredictable appetite and relationship with food.

    If you have done a lot of work on feeling your feelings and listening to your body and your relationship with food still feels out of control or completely unpredictable then find someone who you can explore potential past traumas with. Once these are healed your body will naturally come back into balance and it will be so much easier to manage your relationship with food.

    If this blog resonated you might also like to explore this one

    It is not in the scope of this blog to get deep down into the science behind how trauma affects your body, just please be aware that it can have a really big impact on how you eat. If you think past trauma could be affecting your relationship with food please reach out, you don’t need to go through this alone, drop me an email sasha@sashafardell.com

    *This is just an amazon link for convenience, I have absolutely no affiliation with amazon and get nothing if you purchase the book through this link

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  • Binge Eating, Blogvember, Emotional Eating, Intuitive Eating, Recovery, Spirituality

    17 – Is mindful eating important and what even is it anyway?

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    For me the term mindful eating has been wrongly appropriated by the diet industry. Diet tips often include things like ‘savour your food’, eat slowly, put your knife and fork down between bites, drink water as you eat, chew your food 20 times before you swallow.

    All these things are technically mindful eating, however the way they are sold is as though if you do these things they will help you to eat less and therefore lose weight. I want to reclaim these mindful eating tools as helpful ways to train us to eat intuitively and NOT as weight loss tips.

    Mindful eating is great for us in a myriad of ways. It helps us focus on our food rather than eating distractedly, it brings ceremony and importance to our meals which helps us enjoy them more and it also help us connect with the food we are eating and therefore aids our digestive process. All of these things help us tune in to our bodies more, enjoy the food we’re eating and therefore cultivate a healthier relationship with food and our bodies.

    Mindful eating is an amazing way we can learn to eat more intuitively. It helps us quit dieting and stop emotionally eating.

    One of the main things that happens when we emotionally eat is that we disconnect our minds from our bodies. Our minds are in distress, we are upset or angry so we turn to food. We ignore whether our body is saying it is hungry or full or whether it is craving vegetables or protein, instead we follow the part in our mind which is saying ‘feed me food that will bring instant pleasure right now’. Because we have trained ourselves to respond to our thoughts all the time there is no room to listen to what our bodies are saying. We have learnt to short circuit our own internal cues.

    This is where mindful eating comes into play.

    Mindful eating practices help us to reconnect our minds and bodies. When we eat more slowly and with more focus our mind relaxes it’s control and we can hear more clearly what our bodies are saying.

    Binge eating is an extreme manifestation of mindless emotional eating. We want to crush down how we are feeling, or repress it before it even rears it head, so we stuff down as much food as we can. We are abusing food. Food is actually for nourishing our bodies, giving us energy and bringing a little simple joy into the experience of being alive. If we are shoving it into our mouths to forget our feelings we are purposefully using food for the opposite reasons. In order to stop binge eating we can change how we eat – the speed, the thoughts and the process – in order to reset ourselves and therefore start using food for its intended purpose.

    A key tenet of mindful eating is slowing down. Put your food on a plate, eat with a knife and fork, chew your food properly before taking another bite, pause briefly periodically while you’re eating and see how your stomach feels. Slowing down is not just about being able to listen to what our stomach is saying but also what the rest of our body is experiencing.

    By slowing down our eating the emotion we are trying to hide (in the case of emotional eating/bingeing) might come up to the surface. Tears might threaten to pour, a scream might rise up from the bottom of our lungs. This is what you are supposed to be dealing with. This is your body saying please stop hiding your feelings with food. If emotions rise up put the food down and honour your feelings. Honour yourself, honour your body, respect the reality of the moment.

    Being more mindful with our food is another avenue to being more mindful with ourselves. Another way we can get to know ourselves better. When we get to know ourselves better, paradoxically we don’t need to hide from ourselves in food anymore. Therefore more mindful eating means less emotional eating and bingeing.

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  • Blogvember, Emotional Eating, Intuitive Eating, Recovery, Self Confidence, Self Love

    15 – What is Radical Self-Love?

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    I’m not going to make you wait until the end of the blog post…let’s start with answering the question ‘what is radical self-love?’

    Radical self love comes with learning to love yourself every single second of every single day no matter who you are meeting, where you are going or what you are doing.

    When you think about it, radical self-love is really our natural state. It is feeling secure in ourselves as human beings, knowing we are fallible, designed to learn from our mistakes and continuing on in life with confidence in ourselves regardless. This is how we are as babies. We turn up in the world and immediately start exploring our humanness, we don’t second guess ourselves or berate ourselves for being hungry or tired, we just go about our day being hungry and tired.

    So why in learning to ‘check ourselves’, to be in this society, to be part of things we learn that loving ourselves all the time as we are is not ok? We are taught that we should in fact not be loving ourselves, that it is somehow wrong to fully be the human that we are.

    The point of telling you this is to show you why your emotional eating has started. Emotional eating is a way of self-medicating our humanness. Yes, we have been told we are wrong for being ourselves, this makes us feel depressed, upset, not good enough…all that stuff. So then we turn to food to fill that hole where our self-worth should be.

    The truth is we aren’t less worthy if we make a mistake, or annoy someone, or overreact sometimes. There is no need for us to feel bad about ourselves when we do those things, there is no reason to stuff our faces because our friend is upset with us, we had a fight with our partner or we made a massive error at work. Those things make us human.

    When you emotionally eat you are denying your own humanness. You are saying to yourself it is wrong to be who you are and therefore you need to eat to conceal yourself.

    Radical self-love is the opposite of that.

    Radical self-love is realising that all the time, no matter what, you are loved and lovable. This doesn’t mean you don’t apologise to people you upset or try to fix the mistakes you make if that’s possible. What it means is that you accept that those things happened but that you as a human being are still fundamentally ok.

    Radical self-love means the thought of eating to suppress your feelings doesn’t even come into your mind. It doesn’t enter your thoughts because you eat to nourish yourself, sometimes for pleasure or celebration but mostly because you need energy and you want to feel healthy and full of life. Of course you eat things of less nutritional value because they taste good, but you don’t hide your eating, you don’t feel shame or guilt around what you are putting in your mouth, for the very simple reason that whatever you are eating and whenever you are eating you are doing so out of love and care for yourself.

    Radical self-love is coming back to our natural state. It is the only way to stop emotional eating for good.

    If you’re struggling to know how to get started on your self-love journey, or you have no idea what that could even look like then drop me an email sasha@sashafardell.com and book in for a free self-love strategy session where we look a little more deeply to uncover the real reasons you aren’t loving yourself.

    Lots of love xxx

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  • Anxiety, Blogvember, Emotional Eating, Intuitive Eating

    13 – Are Coffee and Chocolate really the devil?

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    There are plenty of mixed messages out there on these so-called ‘vices’ or common everyday ‘addictions’ so many of us seem to have. We can’t get through the day without our caffeine fix or little chocolate pick me up.

    My aim is not to confuse you any further. Instead I just want to give you an alternative way of looking at these tasty treats.

    I never claim to be a nutritional scientist either or know all the intricate ways these substances affect our body when we ingest them. I am only interested in the emotional circumstances we are in when we choose to consume these things.

    In our society where food and drink are abundant many of us eat not out of necessity but for some other reason. We eat emotionally, for pleasure, to comfort. I would never demonise emotional eating, and nor should you, that simply doesn’t help anyone, what we need to be however is curious. Why are we emotionally eating? Injecting ourselves with these ‘fixes’ in the form of these everyday common foodstuffs.

    When you reach for that coffee or chocolate take a moment to stop and ask yourself what am I trying to hide from right now? With coffee the answer is often ‘tiredness’. You are so tired you need that fix. But why are you so tired? You want to dig deep here. Get right to the root of the problem.

    If you think about this question of tiredness honestly the only logical answer to feeling tired is to sleep…not to reach for stimulants. So why are we choosing not to sleep and instead to stimulate ourselves so we can stay awake? (and it is most definitely a choice by the way)

    If you’re eating chocolate as a distraction, ask yourself what feeling am I trying to avoid? Feel into your solar plexus area, just where your stomach is, does it feel empty? Is there anxiety there? Loneliness? Really take a moment to feel inside yourself and do your best to identify the emotion you are wanting to cover.

    Often we experience this as a void, an uncomfortable feeling of emptiness. I want to implore you to do your best to sit with this discomfort in your body. Follow the sensations of it, notices how it moves around, changes quality, take this short time to be with yourself in that moment.

    If this is not something you are used to doing you might find it excruciatingly uncomfortable to sit with. In that moment perhaps ask yourself “why is it so difficult for me to spend a minute or two quietly, completely alone with myself?”

    There is no problem with using the occasional pick-me-up, we are all imperfect humans and comfort eating or consuming some sort of stimulant is an easy tool to help ourselves feel better. But if this is something you identify as issue, i.e. “I am addicted to coffee” what I want you to start doing is bringing awareness to what you are hiding from in that moment. I promise you that sooner or later you will have to face this emotion, you can repress it with food temporarily but it will keep coming back and unless you want to live the rest of your days eating or stimulating yourself into oblivion it is far far better to face the feeling, however potentially painful it may be so that you can free yourself from the grip of these ‘vices’ and be in a position where you can simply choose to consume them if you really want them.

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  • Binge Eating, Blogvember, Emotional Eating, Intuitive Eating

    11 – How can mindful eating stop us bingeing?

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    For me the term mindful eating has been wrongly appropriated by the diet industry. Diet tips often include things like ‘savour your food’, eat slowly, put your knife and fork down between bites, drink water as you eat, chew your food 20 times before you swallow.

    All these things are technically mindful eating, however the way they are sold is as though if you do these things they will help you to eat less and therefore lose weight. I want to reclaim these mindful eating tools as helpful ways to train us to eat intuitively and NOT as weight loss tips.

    Mindful eating is great for us in a myriad of ways. It helps us focus on our food rather than eating distractedly, it brings ceremony and importance to our meals which helps us enjoy them more and it also help us connect with the food we are eating and therefore aids our digestive process. All of these things help us tune in to our bodies more, enjoy the food we’re eating and therefore cultivate a healthier relationship with food and our bodies.

    Mindful eating is an amazing way we can learn to eat more intuitively. It helps us quit dieting and stop emotionally eating.

    One of the main things that happens when we emotionally eat is that we disconnect our minds from our bodies. Our minds are in distress, upset or angry so we turn to food. we ignore whether our body is saying it is hungry or full or whether it is craving vegetables or protein, instead we follow the part in our mind which is saying ‘feed me food that will bring instant pleasure right now’. Because we have trained ourselves to respond to our thoughts, our minds, all the time there is no room to listen to what our bodies are saying. We have learned to short circuit our own internal cues.

    This is where mindful eating comes into play.

    Mindful eating practices help us to reconnect our minds and bodies. When we eat more slowly and with more focus our mind relaxes it’s control and we can hear more clearly what our bodies are saying.

    Binge eating is an extreme manifestation of mindless emotional eating. We want to crush down how we are feeling, or repress it before it even rears it head, so we stuff down as much food as we can. We are abusing food. Food is actually for nourishing our bodies, giving us energy and bringing a little simple joy into the experience of being alive. If we are shoving it into our mouths to forget our feelings we are purposefully using food for the opposite reasons. In order to stop binge eating we can change how we eat – the speed, the thoughts and the process – in order to reset ourselves and therefore start using food for its intended purpose.

    A key tenet of mindful eating is slowing down. Put your food on a plate, eat with a knife and fork, chew your food properly before taking another bite, pause briefly periodically while you’re eating and see how your stomach feels. Slowing down is not just about being able to listen to what our stomach is saying but also what the rest of our body is experiencing.

    By slowing down the emotion we are trying to hide (in the case of emotional eating/bingeing) might come up to the surface. Tears might threaten to pour, a scream might rise up from the pit of our stomachs. This is what you are supposed to be dealing with. This is your body saying please stop hiding your feelings with food. If emotions rise up put the food down and honour your feelings. Honour yourself, honour your body, respect the reality of the moment.

    Being more mindful with our food is another avenue to being more mindful with ourselves. Another way we can get to know ourselves better. When we get to know ourselves better, paradoxically we don’t need to hide from ourselves in food anymore. Therefore more mindful eating can only mean less emotional eating and bingeing.

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