How Overeating & Emotional Eating Started & 5 Ways to Heal It
Can you recall a time when you got off an upsetting phone call, or finished a stressful meeting and went straight for the fridge like a blindfolded bandit and ate whatever you could get your hands on?
If you’ve ever stuffed yourself with way too many late night snacks to avoid facing your feelings, or stared at the bottom of an ice cream bucket wondering how it all disappeared so fast? If you struggle with overeating, wild food cravings and emotional eating, this article is for you.
How Your Unhealthy Eating Habits Began
Our emotional eating habits take root in some of our earliest behaviours and experiences with food.
No mother likes to hear her baby cry. In the beginning, whenever you expressed frustration, annoyance, irritation or fatigue and let your baby tears fall, chances are very good your mother’s first response was to put you on the breast or bottle to soothe and comfort you.
Whether you were hungry, lonely, tired or just confused about what was going on around you, as a small infant you were likely given food to soothe your irritations. If your mother breastfed you, then that food was also magnificently entangled with the smells and comforts of your mother’s love.
The practice of “comfort nursing” or feeding infants whenever they appear to be in distress, marks the beginning of an emotionally complex and confusing relationship between eating and emotions.
How Meal Time Became an Emotional Eating Time Bomb
As soon as you were able to mutter a few cute syllables and hold on to your first teething biscuit, food started to be used as a form of compensation, reward, motivation and downright bribery!
As young children, we learn that celebration means SUGAR– birthdays, Halloween, Easter, Valentine’s Day, and Christmas are all heavily associated with sugary foods, big heavy meals, or both!
This pattern plays itself out year after year, celebration after celebration from earlier than we can remember, and is hugely influential in establishing our emotional associations with food.
What’s a movie without popcorn? a dinner date without dessert? Christmas without gingerbread and candy canes? Thanksgiving without turkey?
When our frustrations, irritations, and negative emotions are soothed with “the boob” and food, it can easily result in the creation of irresistible triggers for those of us who wrestle with emotional eating, overeating and food cravings.
Figuring out how to change those habits or stop them altogether is a whole other story, but these five steps should help.
5 Ways to Turn Unhealthy Eating Habits Into an Opportunity for Personal Growth
[tweet_box design=”box_12_at” pic_url=”https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/2555858562/hdjdic8en18c0js3qxvl_400x400.jpeg” author=”Tera Warner”]The more you try NOT to have something, the more you end up stuck with it. [/tweet_box]
When trying to find solutions for overeating and emotional eating, we want to look at how we can work with the experience and turn it into something helpful, powerful, inspiring and empowering, rather than point out what’s wrong, unhealthy or “bad” about it!
Here are five ways you can transform your eating habits into a more positive and empowering experience:
#1. FEEL Your Feelings.
There are two things that take a whole lot of energy from the body in order to make happen; digesting food and managing emotions.
Each of these functions require such significant energetic resources that it can be difficult to carry the two processes out simultaneously. By eating when you’re sensitive emotionally, you are using food to physically suppress the emotions that come up to the surface.
One of the best ways to transform emotional eating habits into more positive and empowering behaviour around food starts with a willingness to face and experience emotions and sensations when they come up.
While that sounds good in theory, if you have a habit of emotional eating it takes guts when these emotional surges come pulsing through to just observe them. Sometimes the hand is in the mouth with something sweet or salty before the brain can even catch wind of what’s happened!
Try to observe the sensations and emotions while they are happening. Even if you stop for a few minutes and FEEL your feelings before eating, you’ll start to regain some control over the situation and from there interesting things can start to happen!
Feelings might tell you something and have their own adventure to offer, so before you stuff them away with food, FEEL THEM!
#2.Choose Healthy Foods.
Diving into a bowl of pasta or a box of donuts as your emotional eating food of choice means you will be much more likely to not just emotionally eat, but overeat. Meats, cheeses, bread, or grain products and chocolate are addictive.
How much steamed broccoli can one girl eat?
When you’re under pressure and choose to go for foods that are low in nutrient density and high in calorie, you’re setting yourself up for a double dose of trouble. Make yourself a decadent bowl of Banana Ice Cream and pull out a dainty spoon.
When you choose nourishing foods, then your body will cue you much more quickly that it is satisfied and has had enough, and you’ll be less likely to overeat. Also, when you finish, you won’t be heavily burdened in the digestive system, so you’ll still have a little energetic juice left to feel your feelings, too!
#3. Let Yourself Have It.
Forcibly trying to resist things often only brings them upon you faster and harder, so there is no point clutching the sides of your chair, teeth chattering while you “resist” the chocolate cake or salty snacks.
Once you’ve decided you’re going to eat something, let yourself have it. I’ve seen smokers who sit there puffing away talking about the dangers of smoking and how bad it is for them.
It’s bad enough to smoke. If you decide to do it, don’t add a bunch of energetic and emotional negativity around it. Enjoy your cigarette. The more you do, the less you’ll find you actually “need” or even want to have it.
Slow down and take the “can’t have” off your eating experiences. Decorate your plate with berries and make it a bit of an experience. You can even overdramatize it by pulling out candles, a fancy table cloth and making it feel special. You will be shocked to realize how allowing yourself to have food can extinguish your compulsions toward it.
Can’t haves create must haves. When you take away the taboo factor and let yourself enjoy your food, you’ll feel better, digest better and almost miraculously handle your compulsions for that food in the first place.
Make the experience not just about the food itself, but the presentation, the style, the entire experience and every sensation and perception around it. Allow yourself to HAVE the experience.
Snuggle in a corner on the couch somewhere where you can fully appreciate the moment by making it special and savour every spoonful. When you make it something special and positive and pay attention to your sensations, it will lose its negative connotations and you’ll see some surprising changes in how you respond emotionally to food.
More than eating “bad” food, or consuming too many calories, the one thing plaguing women more than anything else is a nasty virus of self-punishment, guilt and invalidation.
#4. Check In before You Chew.
When you are tired, worn out, stressed, or under pressure you’ll find it’s even harder to resist emotional responses to food. Knowing this, you can do the very simple thing of observing your body and checking in with yourself before you chew.
Are you tired?
Are you thirsty?
Are you lonely?
That’s usually a good time to snuggle up for a nap, or go for a little walk, take a BIG drink of water. By incorporating just a little bit of observation power and discipline to find out what you REALLY need, you’ll be able to regain more control and start to change your eating habits.
If you try to completely do away with negative eating habits, overeating and emotional eating, you’ll feel plagued by guilt and feel as if you’re constantly failing.
Give yourself targets you can win. Give yourself a little goal of having a tall glass of water BEFORE you eat. Of having a little power nap before you eat. You’ll find that if you do this, you’ll have a much easier time regaining control over the whole situation.
#5. Be Kind to Yourself.
It’s not easy to change behaviours that may have been there for a lifetime.
Never make yourself wrong or beat yourself up when you stumble. Guilt may be calorie free, but it is not any healthier than a double fudge, brownie or a greasy plate of French fries and gravy.
Celebrate how lucky you are to have so much food in the first place. Consider how fortunate and blessed you are that you can choose to nourish your body in so many different ways, instead of punishing yourself for the less-than-perfect things you may occasionally eat.
Celebrate the fact that where you are, even if it challenges you, offers the potential for great learning and change.
Get out of your head, and get into life. When you allow yourself to experience the sensations going on in life around you, food starts to lose some of its obsessive appeal.
You’re a creative, spiritual firecracker who is nourished by so much more than just food!
Be patient and trust the process. Remember–asking for help is a sign of intelligence, so don’t be afraid to reach out and get some help once in a while. If you want to radically improve your relationship to food and have a big boost of health, energy and confidence, make sure you sign up to experience the Complete Gentle Juice Cleanse. Loaded with articles, recipes, support and inspiration, this course is your perfect map to a whole, new you!
You can get a lot more strategies for emotional eating and tools for handling it when things get out of control here.