End Emotional Eating For Good With This One Skill
What is emotional eating?
Emotional eating is responding to feelings such as stress by eating food that are typically high-carbohydrate and high-calorie with low nutritional value. Though stress is not the only emotion that can cause you to eat emotionally, and can also be triggered by other negative feelings like sadness, anger and loneliness.
Emotional eating is also usually triggered by a variety of pent-up emotions that you haven’t dealt with yet. Because like most emotional symptoms, emotional eating is thought to result from a number of factors rather than a single cause.
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What usually triggers emotional eating?
While most emotional eating episodes are linked to unpleasant feelings, they can also be triggered by positive emotions, such as rewarding yourself for achieving a goal or celebrating a holiday or happy event. It’s important to recognize your personal triggers for emotional eating, whether they’re because of a place, situation or a feeling. Common triggers of emotional eating could be one or all of the following:
Stress
Not feeling your emotions
Boredom
Feelings of emptiness
Childhood habits
Social influences
Emotional hunger can be a powerful feeling, which is why it’s often easily mistaken for true physical hunger.
Emotional hunger vs ‘true’ hunger
When it comes to hunger it’s important to know how to distinguish emotional hunger from physical hunger. And if you regularly use food to deal with your feelings, finding the difference between the two might be a little more difficult. But there are clues you can look for to help tell the two apart.
The signs of emotional hunger can be any or all of the following:
It comes on suddenly
It feels like it needs to be satisfied right away
It craves specific comfort foods
It isn’t satisfied with a full stomach and forces you to overeat
The signs of physical hunger can be any or all of the following:
It comes on gradually
It can wait to be satisfied
It is open to options, lots of things sound good
It stops when you’re full
Masculine and feminine energies
Understanding how your energies, like your masculine and feminine energies, work together can influence your emotional eating. In so much of my work with clients who struggle with cravings and the feeling of not feeling in control of their eating, clients who have tried so many different diets and programs and constructs, none of those ‘fixes’ for emotional eating have worked. And it’s not surprising.
When you put yourself into a construct that asks you to put aside yourself, it only gives you a relief in the short run of things. It gives you this sense of feeling that you have something to follow, you have a program that you can absolve all your responsibility and accountability into, and you’ll get results. It basically says to you, “This is going to give you what you’re looking for, this is going to give you the outcome that you desire”. And that perspective is really a masculine perspective, meaning it’s very outcome driven. But it doesn’t address your deeper needs. This masculine perspective that many diets and constructs have don’t address your individuality and why you got here.
Asking yourself how and why
We need to stop asking ourselves “How can I change myself” and start asking ourselves “How did I become this self” because that’s the essential question. We need to remember that the only way out is through, and the only way to change is through. So only through moving into and moving towards developing new ways to explore and discover how we became this person that is struggling with a relationship to food, is how you end your emotional eating for good.
Food in and of itself is a soothing activity and it’s an activity. So it makes us feel like we’re doing something. That part of us that feels like we need to produce, feels like we need to contribute to the world, gives us something to do. And so the goal is to really pivot that, to pivot that part of our psyche and that part of our emotional body. To not feel like food is the only way that we can feel or feel like we are taking action because everything else feel so out of control. And it's not so much that it's out of control, it's just that we don't understand it. And the thing that makes us feel really in control is understanding the why and having a how, and that's really what we need to understand.
Understanding the how and why
We need to understand why we are relating to food in this way, and then we need the how to things. We need some strategies and tools of the how to disrupt our habitual conditioned ways of doing things. And then we need to take the understanding which is the insight, the tools and strategies of the how, and then install that. This is basically what experience gives us. If we relate to our experience, which can be food or any other sensual experience, we can learn to relate to the content of the experience differently.
Because if we bring in awareness investigation investigation to the content of out experience, meaning we understand why about a certain experience, we can target our feelings about the experience and we can work on providing soothing experiences to that. And we can do this rather than feeling like we need to change the experience altogether.
How does this relate to eating?
When it comes to eating, often times when we're trying to change our eating habits, or eating for an outcome, or when it comes to weight, we think that we need to think of foods as either good foods or bad foods. We think that we need to have deprivation and that it needs to be this all or nothing situation. And the only reason why this happens is because of our attitudes towards the food.
Food attitude
We think the food is the thing that we need to change. We think that the experience of eating that food needs to change so we think that we need to not have that food. But it's really not about that. We need to understand why that food is something that we want, and we need to understand how that food can fit into our day-to-day routine. We need to take responsibility and accountability for ways in which we eat that food.
We need to ask ourselves, are we eating this food because it's coming from a place of joy or is it coming from a place of soothing? Neither of those things are good or bad but once we understand why we're eating that food we don't need to exile the food. We just need to create an accountability structure around the food.
Accountability and structure
This creates that feeling and sense of spaciousness. It creates a feeling sense of trust and it creates a feeling sense of feeling like your desires and things that you enjoy have value.
These are things that often times, whether it's your conditioning or how you were raised or it's just by virtue of pressures that have caused us to ignore what's inside ourselves.
We often times move into this place of doing and just wanting solutions and results and outcome oriented things. And that's why we approach eating in this exact same way.
We approach eating and we approach our physical goals from this place of outcome. Which points back at that masculine energy of outcome and rules, and about how A to B equals C.
It comes from inside
Where in reality the way to feel full and to feel how you want to feel, is to be able to feel good about your body. And you don't get that from these constructs because often times they result in you giving up who you are. And even more often times in these constructs you're walking around in this sense of fear that the second you eat anything else the thinness the construct has brought you is going to go away.
And that fear then begins to tap in and suck out all of that goodness and trust and vibrancy that you got from feeling thin because it didn't come from an authentic, deep rooted place. It was coming from an external place, and it came from a place where you trust something outside of yourself to get you there.
This is why the most important thing to do is to learn to trust ourselves from the inside. And that requires a really immersive and strong willingness to go deep into the how and the why we got here to begin with.
Getting deep into the how and why
We need to understand how and why we even got here to begin with, and a main part of it is really being honest and understanding how you want to feel in your life. You really need to ask yourself “Who am I?”, and what is your natural self sense where you feel good about yourself.
Are you someone who is more of a do-er and action taker in life, and if you are maybe there are ways where you can do more of that.
Or are you someone who is more of a creative and receptive person, and you’re coming out of your sensor and doing so much when in reality it’s really coming from a place of people pleasing.
Maybe you’re worried that you’re going to lose something or you’re not going to be approved of by someone else, and that’s why you’re doing so much. But that’s what is going to pull you out of your sensor.
When you’re pulled out of your center, your energy and trust get depleted, and when your energy and trust of yourself gets depleted is when you start to emotionally eat. Because that is the most natural and conditioned way that we know how to feel in control and how to soothe ourselves.
The one way to end emotional eating
So if you want to really know the one true way and the one thing you need in order to get control of emotional eating, and pave the way for a better relationship with food, then you need to learn how to trust yourself.
It’s learning how to trust yourself.
It’s learning how to understand how and why you became who you are right now. It’s understanding how you’re off balance with your true authentic self, developing insight, and then from that insight creating new and applicable strategies that overtime get installed. And once they are installed they actually change your belief system and your behaviors.
How to do this
You do this by participating in life, and by not cutting anything out of life. You participate in your life from a place of interest, and a place of de-identification. You participate in your life from a place of de-personalization, so you’re not trying to change the experience but rather trying to change your attitude towards the emotion or feeling sense you get from an experience. So if an experience is making you uncomfortable, you don’t necessarily have to change the experience. You just need to investigate the nature of the discomfort, and from there is where you get your insights.
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So how you change your relationship to food, and how you get to the outcome that you want to feel in your body around food and your weight and around your body image, doesn’t come from acquiescing to an outside construct but is actually creating an internal architecture.
This internal architecture that gets built through insight and through installation over time because of your attitude towards your life experience. And your ability to navigate the different life experiences with strategies and tools to manage the discomfort or the uncertainty around things, rather than having to change the actual experience itself.
Extra tips for emotional eating
Try meditation. Simple deep breathing is meditation that you can do almost anywhere. Sit in a quiet space and focus on your breath, slowly flowing in and out of your nostrils.
Try eating mindfully. Resist grabbing a whole bag of chips or other food to snack on. Measuring out portions and choosing small plates to help with portion control are mindful eating habits to work on developing.
Give yourself a hunger reality check. Is your hunger physical or emotional? If you ate just a few hours ago and don't have a rumbling stomach, you're probably not hungry. Give the craving time to pass.
Try limiting your temptations. Don't keep hard-to-resist comfort foods in your home. And if you feel angry or blue, postpone your trip to the grocery store until you have your emotions in check.
