Creating Your OWN Personalized Emotional Cravings Protocol

When you are working to heal emotional eating, having a personalized approach is most effective. The three step cravings protocol that I recommend, Pause, Reflect, Release, is helpful for most as a guideline. However, what you do within each phase will help you make it your own. When you have a personalized approach, it feels more authentic and doable and is far more likely to be sustainable.

When you find the tools that work for you, you want to practice them consistently. Awareness builds with effort and consistency. Self-awareness will continue to grow as you become more and more comfortable understanding and accepting your internal emotional world. I emphasize the acceptance process as it is absolutely vital to healing. When you understand the inner workings of your own mind, you create a tremendous capacity to heal, grow and accept yourself and others without judgment.

As you continue to more effectively manage your emotional food cravings, you create a sense of mastery which inevitably increases your experience of internal emotional comfort. When you no longer fear your feelings but instead understand, embrace and deeply accept them, you are essentially understanding, embracing and deeply accepting yourself.

The process of making peace with food is the process of making peace with yourself. With emotional, stress and disordered eating, it is never actually about the food, it is more about a limited acceptance of yourself and a limited ability to connect with yourself in a meaningful way. When you place conditions in order to accept yourself completely, you leave yourself open to creating negative cognitions about yourself such as feeling not good enough, inadequate or as though you have to be perfect.

These negative cognitions are not useful, generally untrue and hold you back from knowing yourself and caring for yourself. When you are not caring for yourself and believing the negative cognitions as if they are true, you will most likely lack motivation. As you become more emotionally aware you build confidence, you are able to believe in yourself and your capability to feel strong and healthy. Releasing the old negative cognitions and subsequent thought patterns is essential.

As you work with your own personal emotional cravings protocol, you will feel empowered in the moment, you get to choose how to manage a specific emotional craving. As you build your determination to use your protocol consistently, you will strengthen your mindset and make the best choice possible in the moment.

When you think about the three specific steps, Pause, Reflect, Release and creating a personalized protocol that works for you, it is helpful to know the specific element of each that you find to be useful.

Within the Pause phase, what helps you Pause? Do you prefer to set a timer for 1-5 minutes in the moment of awareness that you are mindlessly or emotionally eating? What is helpful next? Have a glass of water and wait for the timer to go off? Do a deep breathing exercise? Determining the specifics of your pause that work for you will help you personalize each step into a useful, actionable tool for managing your food cravings. Once you establish the technique that works best for you, use it consistently in order to effectively utilize the Pause phase.

During the Reflection phase, what works most effectively for you to Reflect on your emotional experience? What proactive element can you incorporate to make this Reflection time useful and effective? Is it helpful for you to talk about your emotion? Do you prefer to write in a journal? Does taking a walk and pondering your emotions help? Do you need to take some space away from the emotion first and practice mindfulness or relaxation and then take time to reflect?

Find what reflective process works for you and helps you identify the why behind your emotion. Once you Reflect you can take time to make a choice on how to respond to the specific emotion. If something needs to be done, decide when you will take action on it.

As you move into the Release phase, determine what helps you Release and let go of emotions that are no longer serving you. Does deep breathing help you? You can breathe in and imagine peace and contentment flowing in, and breathe out, imagining all that is not serving you mentally, emotionally and physically releasing. Does journaling support your releasing process? Does mindfulness and/or visualization help?

To visualize the Release, you can imagine your emotions on a cloud—drifting away in the sky—or your emotions releasing with the imagery of leaves floating past you on a river. Whatever helps you internalize the experience of letting go, that is what will be most effective for you to do during this phase of Release.

Take time to write down your process and know it may be different for different emotional experiences. Write down what you will do to create a personalized Pause, Reflect and Release. Have these steps nearby so you can access them in times that it may not initially come naturally for you. The rest is practice and time, time and practice. Practice is the only way to integrate the process and make it work for you within your life.  

Did you come up with a creative Pause Reflect and Release? Let me know! I’d love to hear how you are implementing these tools. How are they working for you? Need support? Know that I am here to help support you along your journey to making peace with food as well as with yourself.

How to Pause and Listen to Your Body: Integrating Mindful and Intuitive Eating

Learning to pause and listen to your body is one of the most profound ways to heal your relationship with food. Connecting with the present moment by being mindful and intuitively aware of your body is healing. We often spend a good bit of time lost in thought, mindlessly rushing from one aspect of the day to the next which often results in mindlessly eating.

When was the last time you found yourself looking in the cabinet and yet you weren’t really hungry or finishing a bag of chips and wondering how you got there in the first place? These things happen, and when you struggle with emotional and stress eating, it can become a mindless action used to avoid or suppress emotions and stress. When you engage in mindless eating to ease stress or numb out emotions it may lead to forming habit pattern of mindless eating.

This is where learning to Pause and check in with your body and mind can be such a powerful action to take along your path to making peace with food. When you Pause, you begin to engage with the present moment as it is right now. When you Pause, you are respecting your body, your needs and tuning into your intuition.

Within the space of the Pause, you create an opportunity to make a choice. This is where the power lies when you become mindfully engaged with the present moment. In the present moment you can check in with how stress or your emotions are impacting your mind, your body, your energy, your mood and your choices. When truly present, you can ask yourself how you want to feel and make choices based on this—rather than on avoidance and fear of feeling your feelings.

If you have been reading here for some time, you most likely already know the definition of mindfulness. However, I am going to repeat it, because it is so useful to have the reminder. Mindfulness is paying attention from moment to moment with nonjudgmental awareness. The non-judgment part is often one of the biggest challenges. Our minds judge by nature and create conditions that can feel pressured or uncomfortable.

When you engage with the Pause in the moment of a craving or when you catch yourself mindlessly eating or avoiding emotions and stress, you are essentially practicing mindfulness. When you use the moment of Pause and make a different choice based on how you want to feel, you are growing your mindfulness muscles (so to speak) to create more strength, awareness and comfort internally.

Now that you have allowed yourself to Pause, you can create and build self-awareness. Taking time to ask yourself, “What is happening right now?” “Why am I stressed?” “Why is this emotion I seem to want to avoid through food here in the first place?” “Is there another choice I can make in this moment?” These questions lead to self-awareness, growth and the opportunity to heal your relationship with food and with yourself.

When you allow yourself to be curious about your emotions and behaviors you create the perspective of non-judgment. You can be kind and compassionate to yourself, which will be far more tolerated internally than being mean and judgmental towards yourself! When you become overly judgmental towards yourself, you are more likely to emotionally eat, regress and feel shameful or like a failure. When you are kind to yourself you are more likely to grow, to push through the challenges and create the change you want.

Once you have examined the pause in a mindful manner, you have an opportunity to make a choice. What else can you do in this moment? Here you might opt to set a timer for 5 minutes and have a glass of water. You might choose to practice deep breathing or remove yourself from the kitchen, food item, cabinets, whatever is causing the mindless eating and cravings.

If you struggle with emotional eating, you may struggle to connect to your intuition. You may feel a sense of being disconnected from your body and your gut feelings. When you take the time to Pause, and examine the space within the pause, you will get back in touch and connect with your intuition and inner knowing.

When you Pause you can observe what is happening internally. Is there something your intuition is trying to communicate to you? Be curious and open to listening to your inner wisdom. Learn to become accepting of your emotions, internal experiences and inner guidance. Learn to listen and you might be surprise by what you “hear.”

Try this practice the next time you are experiencing a craving or you find that you are mindlessly eating/grazing/staring at the fridge: take time to Pause. As you Pause, look within and tune into your intuition. Ask yourself what you are truly needing and see if you can offer that to yourself within that very moment. Your body and mind are intimately interconnected and practicing this Pause will encourage and strengthen this internal connection.

Giving Thanks: The Power of Gratitude

Here in the U.S. it is Thanksgiving Day. This is a Day where you may celebrate with loved ones and take time to share with one another around the holiday table what you are grateful for. While this can be a wonderful expression of gratitude, when practiced every single day, it can change your entire perspective on life. A gratitude practice can improve your relationships and your attitude in general as it causes your brain to release feel-good hormones like endorphins. Having a regular gratitude practice is powerful and life-enhancing. 

Try incorporating the following practices daily and notice the impact on your mood, your energy, your relationships, your perspective of abundance and on your life as a whole. Practicing gratitude daily has been rigorously studied and proven to increase happiness as well as improve relationships.

The first practice to implement is using a daily gratitude journal. Writing down two things you are grateful for every single day will have a powerful impact on your perspective of abundance in your life. When you take time to recognize all that you do have right now rather than all you wish you had, you create a positive experience of the present moment.

Whether you are recognizing that you are grateful for what you may always have—like waking up in a warm bed or having a dishwasher creating some ease in your day—or for a kind gesture received from a friend or maybe someone held the elevator door for you when you were running late. Taking time to acknowledge the ordinary and the unusual creates positive, enriching feelings. 

When you write down what you are grateful for, take a moment to reflect on it. This creates an experience of savoring the memory, you are allowing that positivity to literally sink into your being and shift your internal experience. You are increasing the “feel-good” hormones in your brain and body.

Keeping a gratitude journal is a powerful tool to maintain a record of all of the good that exists in your life. Reflecting on what you have written in the past when you are feeling a sense of lack or feeling down can serve as a way to shift from a deprivation and down space emotionally and lift you back to a space of contentment. Try keeping a gratitude journal and notice the powerful impact on your life.

The second gratitude practice is telling your partner, child, loved one or friend something you appreciate about them each and every day. Harvel Hendrix, a long-time couples therapist said that couples that tell each other two things they appreciate about each other at the end of the day—every day—have more satisfying and long lasting relationships. This is similar to keeping a gratitude journal, it is just a verbal experience where you get to feel the positive feelings of “reliving” a positive element you noticed in your day.

Even if you are not currently in a relationship, you can have this shared experience with someone you care about, be it a friend, coworker, family member or child. Tell someone you care about what you appreciate about them and why. See how it feels for you to uplift someone. 

When something you did for a person you care about is reflected back to you, it creates a positive internal experience of feeling appreciated. Having that happen in a shared moment allows you to feel close as you end the day with a positive shared experience. Try this practice as well and notice the impact on yourself as well as your relationships.

The last gratitude practice I encourage you to try in order to build happiness and contentment in your life, is writing a gratitude letter. It has been shown that the experience of writing a gratitude letter and sharing it with the person you are grateful for can lift a mild depression for two weeks. That is incredibly powerful. Giving back, being kind and lifting up someone else naturally creates a positive internal experience. Ideally you can deliver and share the letter in person, but if you can’t that’s ok! Mail it, and see how it feels.

Shifting from a sense of lack to a sense of abundance, from a space of wanting to a space of being grateful for and content with exactly what you have right now is freeing. Moving from fear of loss to awareness of and gratitude for the present moment can have a profound impact on your mind, body and spirit. Creating a space for these gratitude practices and consistently engaging with them will create the most powerful results. When you try these practices, notice the impact on your life and let me know how they work for you.