Home Archive by category 'Emotional Eating' (Page 3)

Emotional Eating

  • Blogvember, Body Image, Emotional Eating, Self Confidence, Self Love

    3 – Lose control, find freedom

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    We have all heard it a million times…it’s about control, we all just want more control, right? In the face of our uncertain future we all just want control so that we feel safe and secure. We control our food, we try to control our bodies, our exercise regime and pretty much anything else in our lives so that we don’t have to feel the discomfort of uncertainty.

    The problem with humans is that we are in this eternal race to try and control the things we can’t control while ignoring the things we can. We are so busy trying not to die we don’t stop to explore how to live.

    But if we become less controlling, the more open andsensitive we are to the world we live in, the more curious we get and the more exploration we do and in turn the more we realise just how powerful we are.

    We are taught as children that adults can predict the future. We are told…if you do this, this will happen and often these predictions are correct as applied to the pretty basic structure of rules we have created for ourselves, e.g. if you throw a ball hard at a window there is a good chance it will smash. However what we don’t learn as children is that the world is also full of a million magical things that we can’t explain or control for. Because we are only taught about the basic things we can predict we go out into the world looking for this certainty everywhere. We are not brought up to live in uncertainty and therefore as adults we lose our curiosity and instead fear the unknown. We want to know exactly what the future holds for us. But this is totally at odds with how the world is.

    Trying to control our body weight is another way of us saying to life that we are not prepared to risk what is in store by listening to the wisdom of our intuition and the world around us. We want someone to tell us that if we eat this then this will happen to our bodies. We want to control our bodies so that we can look a certain way and live to a certain age and do certain activities.

    But none of these things are actually in our control, at any moment you might hurt yourself, fall ill or any other myriad of things which will affect your eating and exercise habits. So what we are really doing when we look for diet plans is handing over our physical selves to someone else to tell us what to do with it. We hand over our innate power (i.e – the part of us that already KNOWS what is best for us and our bodies) by asking someone else to give us calorie counts, macros, exercise regimes in the hope of some certainty over our physical body in the future.

    By doing this perhaps we allay our fears for a bit but ultimately what we are doing is shutting down our connection to ourselves. This control overrides the connection between our minds and bodies. This is how we lose ourselves in dieting and food and exercise obsession.

    We literally lose our minds in a wormhole of trying to find the ‘perfect healthy regime’ when actually if we stopped trying to control our bodies and instead listened to them we’d realise our bodies, i.e. ourselves, already know the optimal way to eat and move. If we opened ourselves up to the uncertainty of not knowing how our bodies might feel or look each day and therefore what we will be eating we will find the wisdom and freedom we were looking for all along.

    So when we let go of control we find freedom and it is in that freedom we find happiness and peace with ourselves and our bodies.

    Feeling happy and at peace in our bodies exactly as they are in every moment is where we find our power. The power that lives in true acceptance of ourselves.

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  • Binge Eating, Blogvember, Emotional Eating

    2 – The fear of the ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffet

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    This post is for all of you who are scared of the all you can eat buffet, or any event where there is an unlimited amount of food on supply, for some of us that could even be the grocery store. Trust me, I know that fear. The fear that you will start filling your plate and will literally not be able to stop. You will keep eating and eating and eating until you can’t move, until you feel physically sick, beyond physically sick even.

    I have been there. That horrendous fullness and absolute self-loathing at what a “fat, greedy, disgusting pig” you are. I know it well. There is a secret to stopping these behaviours dead in their tracks though.

    It’s something which confused me for an incredibly long time. It’s paradoxical, it doesn’t make sense when you have lived in diet land for so long. But the whole point is to get out of diet crazy town right? So we need to think differently.

    The reason we binge, the reason we eat and eat and eat at sporadic times, seemingly for no reason is because we. are. not. allowed. to.

    That’s right, we binge because we restrict

    We have this story running in our head that we are not allowed to eat as much as we want in an unlimited way. We spend our whole lives restricting ourselves, telling ourselves we are not allowed to have this, we must have a smaller portion, we can’t have two helpings, we mustn’t have dessert.

    We are constantly trying to control ourselves around food with our minds. We are trying to use willpower to fight our bodies, a battle between the psychological and the physical.  SO when there is a message in the outside world that says ‘all you can eat’ or there is a family barbeque, party, any event with free food…suddenly psychologically we are given this green light, this free pass to literally eat as much as we can before our own minds take back the reins.

    This has broader ramifications as well. Think about it…the only reason you binge is because you restrict yourself. If you didn’t restrict yourself at all around food, physically or psychologically you wouldn’t binge. By psychologically I mean to say that you might still be eating enough to meet your physical needs but if in your mind you are chastising yourself, telling yourself it is too much or not the right thing this counts as psychological restriction.

    So the fastest, simplest way to free yourself from gorging is by giving yourself permission to eat whatever you want whenever you want. Crazy, but it’s the truth.

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  • Blogvember, Body Image, Emotional Eating, Recovery

    1 – Uncovering the REAL reasons behind your emotional eating and how to stop it

    Hello! Welcome to Blogvember, where I’ll be posting a new blog every single day of November covering everything you want to know about emotional eating, binge eating, body-confidence and self-love.

    As this is post number one we are starting off with the biggest, juiciest question of all – why do we emotionally eat and, more importantly, how can we stop?

    Just to warn you this is a pretty long post but I promise it is absolutely worth it and gets right to the root of the problem…if you’re pushed for time you can skip to the end 😉 Please come back tomorrow, and every day this month for more.

    So let’s get straight to business…why do we emotionally eat and how can we stop?

    The simple answer that you may have bumped up against multiple times before is ‘I eat because I’m sad/stressed/angry/annoyed/hormonal and eating chocolate/cake/crisps makes me feel better’. If this is you maybe once a month or once every few months, then this is absolutely fine, go ahead and indulge, your emotional eating is not having a big impact on your life. If however this is you every single day, maybe multiple times a day, and emotional eating is affecting the quality of your life then we can’t settle with this for our answer and we need to dig deeper.

    If you want to stop emotional eating it is likely because it feels compulsive, out of control, one of your only sources of solace, one of the highlights and/or lowlights of your day/week, it is isolating, you are keeping it a secret and it’s making you feel lonely and miserable.

    In order to get to the real reasons behind our emotional eating and how to stop, lets unpick some of the arguments floating around at the moment on this topic.

    There is one line of argument that says particular food, high in sugar, salt, fat, in and of itself has chemical properties which affect our hormones and boost our mood. It gives us a physical rush and therefore we get addicted and come to rely on this high when we are feeling low. This argument goes even further to say that our low moods are partially triggered by the crash after eating these foods so we end up in a rollercoaster cycle of constantly craving these foods and feeling grumpy and down when we aren’t eating them. This argument puts a lot of blame on food companies for producing this ‘addictive’ food and is the argument that has led to the demonisation of certain foods, sugar in particular.

    This is a legitimate argument for how these foods affect us and therefore might temporarily cheer us up when we’re down but for me barely scratches the surface of why we feel such a compulsion to drown ourselves in food rather than face our feelings. The reason we can’t quit sugar is not because it is chemically addictive but it is because the underlying reason for us eating it, i.e. that we feel low, hasn’t been resolved. Even if you disagree with this…the real question remains – why are we feeling so bad in the first place?

    Let’s explore another line of reasoning that is popular right now on how we have got to this place with our food. This argument says that the reason we emotionally eat is because we feel bad about our bodies. The media and diet culture are telling us we need to look a certain way and most of us don’t therefore most of us are unhappy with our bodies and want them to look more like what is portrayed in the media and by those selling us diets. In this paradox the more we hate our bodies the more we want to emotionally eat and therefore the more we hate our bodies. It’s a trap and we can’t escape. The solution? Let’s not hate our bodies. Then we won’t feel upset about them and we won’t emotionally eat or if sometimes we do emotionally eat it’s ok because we love our bodies anyway.

    I personally like this approach for its body positive message, inclusivity, diversity, and acceptance of all body shapes and sizes. It decriminalises emotional eating and empowers individuals to eat what they want whenever they want and love themselves anyway. We can see media slowly changing with more body-diversity messages coming through and it appears more people are catching on. They love their bodies, emotional eating or not.

    But it begs the question

    …if we love our bodies as they are but we are still emotionally eating then wanting our bodies to change can’t be the reason for emotional eating right?

    We have to look again and ask the questions are you really loving yourself if you’re emotionally eating all the time? Are you really comfortable with yourself if you are still seeking solace in food? Maybe you are the most body positive person of all time, you absolutely love your cellulite, stretch marks and how your body looks in the mirror…but what if you are still eating to hide from yourself?

    Here we get to the crux of this post. Why we are still emotionally eating and how we can stop.

    We eat emotionally because we are trying to run away from ourselves. We are doing anything to avoid feeling our feelings. We have totally disconnected our minds and bodies and are letting our mind control everything. We are not listening to our bodies and are in fact avoiding all the signals they are sending us instead letting our minds run the show.

    Surprise, our minds do not want us to feel particular emotions in our body and that’s where food comes in. We have been taught in our society that pain is bad and pleasure is good. Therefore our minds have been programmed to chase the pleasure and repress/hide from/push away/bury the pain. Food is an excellent tool for us to do both at the same time, it is safe (mostly), legal, convenient and socially acceptable.

    Example – We have an argument with our friend because they are always late and caused us to miss our restaurant reservation, so seething with frustration, we head home. We feel angry and upset at our friend and rather than take the time to put together a nutritious meal we ‘cant be bothered’ because our evening is ruined so we sit down with half a tub of ice-cream and some cake and forget about it.

    In this example we are choosing not to sit with and process our feelings of anger and sadness towards our friend, i.e. our pain in this situation, but instead look towards food to bring us pleasure to replace this pain. What this pattern does is repeatedly teach us that feeling anger or sadness is not ok and it is better to find something to numb those feelings and replace them with something more pleasurable. As an isolated incident ok this is not a big deal. But what happens with chronic emotional eating is that we do this in every scenario in our lives.

    Every single time we feel any emotion that is slightly painful we look to food to soothe ourselves. This is when emotional eating begins to take over our lives. Someone sends you a rude email? Reach for a biscuit. You spill your coffee on yourself? Have a little chocolate to make yourself feel better. Your train is late? Pick up a croissant while you wait. You start doing this subconsciously until you literally find yourself in an emotional eating minefield that you can’t get out of.

    This is not to mention the full on blow-outs when something really crappy happens and we find ourselves in bed with junk food wrappers strewn around us wondering how our life ended up like this.

    So how we do stop it?

    There are two things we need to do if we want to stop emotional eating. And trust me, you do.

    This emotional eating is a problem, even if you love your body and don’t want to change it, because you are not feeling your feelings. You are not being honest with yourself and you are storing up pent up, often painful, emotion.

    This emotion will need to come out at some point and hiding it with food is only kicking the can down the road.

    Coming back to our example, you know that anger and sadness you didn’t allow yourself to feel towards your friend? Guess what, those feelings are going to keep coming up every time someone is late…think about it. Every single time someone is late you are going to get more and more angry and upset because your body is reminding you of the emotions you didn’t let come out that time your friend was late and caused you to miss dinner until one day you will explode at someone for running 5 minutes late and they will be completely shocked and probably hurt by your lack of understanding and disproportionate response to such a minor transgression.

    So first things first, to stop emotional eating we need to replace the eating with what we should be doing in the first place, which is…

    …feeling our feelings as they happen.

    This includes pain, especially emotional pain. We need to feel those feelings and let them be what they are without trying to hide from them by face planting a cake.

    This is more difficult than it sounds. For something that is so natural we humans have done an excellent job of stopping ourselves from being able to do this. We stop ourselves crying when we’re sad, screaming when we’re angry, even hugging each other when we feel love. If you are very expressive but still emotionally eat then try tapping in to the exact feeling you feel the moment when you are reaching for food. This will show you exactly what feeling you are repressing (hint: it is probably something like loneliness, emptiness or sadness). The reason so many of us emotionally eat rather than do this is because the feelings we are hiding from hurt. They are powerful and we have often been hiding them for a long time. If you are looking to explore deep emotional pain I would highly recommend you find support, in a friend, therapist, teacher or coach, to be with you as you uncover these feelings.

    So that is part one, get on board with feeling your feelings rather than hiding from them. Perhaps more painful in the short term but will lead you to food freedom and a far more fulfilling life in the long run.

    And this leads us to the second thing.

    In order to do number one, we also need to do number two and that is learn to accept that painful feelings are not bad and are actually safe for us to feel.

    Painful feelings are just that…feelings. We do not need to be scared of them or hide from them. Painful feelings are showing us what we find uncomfortable in life, they are our markers for maintaining our emotional health. They are the guide ropes we need to heal past wounds. Or if you don’t have past wounds (newsflash: if you struggle with emotional eating you probably do) then they are a signal for what you need to respond to now in your life, even though it is uncomfortable.

    Again, this is not easy for we have been taught that pain is bad. But it is something that we can change the more we practice feeling and accepting all of our emotions.

    If you do these two things, practice them consistently in your life, emotional eating will become a thing of the past. You will no longer need to eat cake to run away from yourself because there will be nothing to run away from. You will be living in the moment, facing all your feelings and dealing with them as they arise. Now wouldn’t that be an easier way to live?

    Please come back tomorrow and every day this month for more.

    Sending you lots of love and strength xxx

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