How to Heal Yourself From Food Guilt & Emotional Eating

How to Heal Yourself From Food Guilt & Emotional Eating

– by Rebecca Johnson

EFT or (Emotional Freedom Technique) is a simple, powerful and effective therapeutic tool that can be used to identify and eliminate emotional blocks and limiting beliefs that are keeping you stuck.

Traumas, big and small, tie up the energy in our bodies and cause us to feel blocked. You don’t need to spend a year in therapy to start feeling better about yourself. You don’t have to spend weeks toiling over self-help books and meditating your way to peace. You don’t even have to “believe” or have faith to experience the benefits of EFT.

It just works. You can try it on everything, including your relationship with food!

Do These Sound Familiar?

Do any of these scenarios seem familiar?

• You crack open a bag of sour-cream-and-cheddar potato chips telling yourself, you are only going to eat a few. Before you know it, half the bag is gone!

•  You’ve put yourself on a healthy, new eating plan. You have been eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and tiny quantities of brown rice (no butter). Three days in, you are so sick of snacking on carrot sticks and cucumber, you decide to stop off at McDonald’s for that Big Mac and fries that have been calling your name.

• It’s 10:00 pm. Everyone else is in bed and you find yourself staring at the bottom of a bucket of Ben & Jerry’s “Chunky Monkey” ice cream thinking,  “At least it had bananas in it.”  Simultaneously, you wish you could rewind the clock ten minutes and take it all back.

•  It’s Christmas dinner. You’ve been polite at the table until now, but it’s time to clean up the dishes and put the leftovers away. When no one is looking, you stuff as many spoonfuls of mashed potatoes as you possibly can down the hatch. You’re already full and satisfied, but as you mindlessly finish swallowing, you reach down to unzip your jeans and accommodate your overstuffed belly.

What Unconditional Love Has to Do With It

Do you still truly love and accept yourself, even though you’ve just made a choice you regret ten minutes after it’s over? As counter intuitive as it sounds, being able to truly love and accept yourself is one of the most crucial keys to exiting the cycles of overeating and bingeing.

Many of us have fallen into the trap of critically parenting ourselves inside our own head. We often unwittingly use deep fear and shame tactics, mistakenly believing that if we don’t drive ourselves and punish ourselves, we won’t ever start to behave “properly.”

If you want to break out of these cycles, give EFT a try. Your battle with bingeing and overeating may not be over yet, but you can use EFT to become a loving observer of your behavior, rather than a shaming parent. When you are coming from a place of love, the cycle itself has no reason to persist.

How to Stop Feeling Guilt & Shame When You Eat

In addition to overcoming bingeing and overeating, EFT can help you eliminate confusion and guilt about what you eat.

How do you feel about yourself when you eat specific foods that are counter to the intentions you have set for yourself? Maybe you are confused about what is ok and what is not ok to eat. There is so much information out there. How do you decide???

Are animal products good or bad for me? Is butter a healthy fat or a sin?  What about avocados? Am I allergic to gluten? With all the conflicting information out there, it can be so hard to determine what is best for your own body.

When you feel guilty about a hundred different food items or food combinations, and you are struggling with which of all the diets is the right one for you, you very well may be walking around with all of that bubbling just under the surface, barely out of reach of your conscious awareness.

As many of my clients have reported, you might feel fear, guilt and shame. You might feel like you are less of a person. You may even feel hatred toward yourself for not being able to figure it out.

These are powerful emotions that can stop you from realizing your potential and experiencing what you desire. When you are knowingly or unknowingly bathing yourself in feelings like guilt, shame and self-hatred, the chances of engaging yourself in really good self-care are slim-to-none.

EFT can help you eliminate confusion, and help you discover with total clarity, what foods your body needs and wants, and what is good and right for you. Once you have this clarity, guilt, shame and fear can quietly disappear, leaving you feeling free and confident about what to eat.

How to Calm Down Cravings & Emotional Eating

One other lovely application for EFT is using it to address cravings! Who doesn’t get those!?!

Maybe you have already tried vigilant self-control to resist cravings, but if you are anything like me, that rarely works in the long run. [tweet_box design=”box_01″]When you decide you can’t have something, you want it even more.[/tweet_box]

What you resist, persists.

While there can be many reasons for a craving, if you find yourself desiring something you really don’t want to pop in your mouth, you can whip out your fingers and tap on that craving right when it’s happening! You can look right at that food item, stare it down, allow all your resistance to come up, and tap into what it is you really want.

Nine times out of ten, it’s not the Twinkie or the Starbucks double-shot-espresso-with-cream, but something deeper that you are really hungry for. EFT can help you identify that true hidden need or desire with such efficiency, it might shock your socks off.

Find Out What EFT Can Do For You

Listen in to this LIVE session of EFT where we show you what’s possible when it comes to sorting out your relationship with food using EFT. Linda has kindly volunteered to put herself on our virtual stage.

Please Note: Most EFT summits and interviews never really give you the opportunity to see what a full, private consultation in EFT can do, and the results can be surprising. We’re grateful Linda has volunteered herself for this experience and trust that you’ll enjoy getting a taste of what freedom can look like.

Rebecca Johnson

Rebecca Johnson is the resident EFT expert at TeraWarner.com. Her passion for helping others to release their emotional blocks and move forward in the pursuit of better health and abundant living  brought her to Tera’s doorstep. She’s moved right in and is now part of the family of health heroines seeking to make the world a better place–one tap on the noggin’ at a time.