How do I stop emotional eating?

Posted by Angela on December 23rd, 2007 filed in Healthy Eating

Emotional eating put very simply is evidence that you are not being supported emotionally. If you are over eating, binge eating or eating uncontrollably there is somewhere in your life where your emotions are not being recognised or released and in order to keep avoiding these emotions we turn to eating and compulsive behaviour. To overcome over eating you need a support SYSTEM, detailed awareness of your personal challenges and outlets to talk about your feelings so you can find other ways to meet your emotional needs.

Eating and emotions start from when we are born. The first impulse for a new born child is to suckle on the breast, which releases positive hormones and feelings for both the child and mother. So emotions and eating ARE connected, we will always have emotions connected to food. As we grow up, the family or community comes together to prepare and eat food. You develop other emotional patterns and reactions from what you pick up from them.

If your family or community have bad eating habits, it’s not unlikely you’ll have the same habits.

Dr Mona Lisa Schulz talks about the connections between the emotions and your body in the CD series Intuitive Listening. She talks about a guy who used to be an alcoholic and now has a food addiction. Dr Schulz has found that the best way to overcome over eating is to have a structured eating program AND to associate with groups who have different habits to the ones that support your current emotional patterns.

What I’ve found interesting - is what happens when you fall off the wagon of any new program or effort you are using to change your life. How to do you talk to yourself - do you say “well, it’s only just this once”, “I knew I was going to stuff up”, “this is too hard”. Whatever you say to yourself - these words are GOLD. Look at what words you are saying, look at the exact wording and then ask yourself where did these words come from. Where did I get that “programming”. Once you find out how you’ve developed your own self talk - you get some important clues as to what emotional pattern and expectations you’ve set up for yourself.

Perhaps you’ve adopted a belief and even words of a parent, sibling or elder. Maybe you’ve created the words all by yourself at a particular age. If you have created the words at a particular age, its helpful to go back in your memory to that time and think about why you took on those words as a part of who you are. Perhaps you had an emotional experience at the time that only allowed you to deal with the experience by using this belief and these words to “cope”.

Feeling your emotions is sometimes too much to handle. And that’s why emotional eating is SO EASY. Sometimes its too hard to feel unpleasant emotions - but it’s very easy to feel good feelings when you eat.

The trick is to not see “unpleasant” emotions as bad - see your “darker” feelings as something like a mystery - like something you always wanted to know more about and start to find ways to understand them so you can bring them to light.