Self-Awareness as a Path to Healing Emotional Eating

Many people struggle with emotional, and stress eating patterns and often feel frustrated, hopeless and helpless when it comes to changing these patterns.  Those who struggle with emotional eating often feel that a diet or wellness program is the only way out of the pattern. However, diets inflict control, restriction and force us into having to think about what to—or not to—eat constantly. Diets may have their place in the world, especially for someone who does not struggle with emotional eating patterns, however, the data is pretty compelling when it comes to the statistics related to the effectiveness of dieting.

It is estimated that each year 45 million Americans go on a diet and that $33 billion is spent on weight loss products. According to the CDC, nearly half of all adults attempted to lose weight in 2018. Research through the National Institute of Health has shown that more than half of the lost weight was regained within two years. The same study showed that by five years post diet, more than 80% of lost weight was regained. Those are not so great numbers in favor of dieting! Yet, the dieting industry continues to prey on people’s weaknesses, exploiting weight as a problem, and offering restriction and control as the only solution. However, clearly their solution is temporary, problematic and potentially damaging to both our minds and our bodies.

Emotional eating really is an attempt to care for ourselves. Soothing emotional pain and life’s stressors with food provides us with a break, a numbing out, a moment where we can feel really good while eating the chosen or desired food. As human beings, we really don’t like to feel uncomfortable or to have to experience pain in any way. We avoid pain, including emotional pain, at all costs, and most of us are not given great coping strategies for dealing with painful emotions as children. While we often end up causing a host of other problems for ourselves through this avoidance of emotional discomfort with food, it is quick, easily available, and works every time.

When this pattern of emotional eating becomes the only way that we know how to handle our emotional suffering, it creates a vicious and dangerous cycle where food is the problem and food is the solution. Emotional eating can lead to undesired weight gain, which incites additional uncomfortable feelings of failure, pain, frustration, and often shame. You can see how this cycle continues to loop, grow roots, and create so much suffering, despite the intended desire and attempt to avoid pain. Patterns of emotional eating often leads to body image struggles, internalized shame, and creates a much deeper suffering, which often only thrusts us back into the yo-yo dieting cycle. Unfortunately, dieting often feels like the only possible solution, yet with the statistics related to dieting you can really foresee where that will lead without some other, more helpful intervention.

This is where mindful and intuitive eating practices can begin to offer some support, hope and challenge to the dieting mentality. Learning to be present with food, listen to our bodies, respect feeling hungry and connect with our bodies in a real way is tremendously powerful. However, difficult and painful emotions will inevitably arise again. Especially if someone has endured trauma or significant suffering (which is pretty much all of us) and a trigger occurs, the pull towards emotional eating can be very strong no matter how much mindful eating you’ve practiced or how in tune you are with your bodies hunger and full cues.

Emotional eating is impossible to heal through a diet or by simply being present with food, hunger, fullness or rejecting diets alone. To heal emotional eating, addressing the uncomfortable emotions, learning about emotional patterns of avoidance, as well as our stressors, and understanding our emotions and processing them is vital to this healing. Healing from the inside out is the only way because emotional eating really has nothing to do with the food at all, but how the food numbs our feelings and comforts our suffering.

There is a misconception that if you heal from emotional eating you won’t find pleasure with eating and be able to enjoy food in the same way. This is a fear that needs to be cleared up immediately, and often arises out of the wake of dieting where deprivation and restriction are necessary. When you can heal from emotional eating and integrate mindful and intuitive eating practices in a way that allows you to be the expert on not only in what your body wants and needs, but also in what brings you pleasure, you can create an immensely pleasurable relationship with food. There is a big difference in eating to experience pleasure versus eating to eliminate pain.

When you explore your patterns, emotions, the what, when, and why you jump towards avoidance with food (or any in any other way) rather than feeling your feelings, you can develop awareness into yourself very deeply. Self-awareness is always the first step; self-awareness is always where we must start on any journey. Without awareness there cannot be any change. To begin, it is helpful to give space to your feelings, to begin to learn and create a language related to feelings and to practice awareness, in the moment if possible, or as reflection if you find that you missed a moment of emotional suppression.

Journaling, mindfulness practices, meditation and reading about emotions are all ways to get closer to our inner world. When we offer ourselves time for reflection on our deeper internal experiences and to determine what really is going on inside ourselves we can discover what are we really feeling and why it is that we feel this way. Discovering what brings ourselves pleasure, comfort, ease, and joy in non-food ways can help create coping strategies that are more beneficial and useful. With time, practice and constantly growing in our self-awareness, food can become unentangled from the web of our emotions.

Giving space to finding pleasure in eating, delighting in foods that do bring us pleasure, comfort, ease and joy when we are not in a space of stress or emotional suffering also creates an opportunity to heal. When stuck in patterns of emotional eating, finding actual joy in eating can trigger feelings of shame or undeservingness, this is an important area to explore as well. When diets, restriction, hiding or withholding pleasure as punishment have been entangled with food, pleasure, body image, and eating, then choosing to eat decadent foods can feel like “cheating.” This is the process of letting go of old stories, patterns and ways of being with food and with ourselves. If eating something we desire causes increased discomfort, this the opposite of our original intent when it comes to healing our relationship with food. It’s helpful to get curious about how this fits into each of our own food stories.

This healing process from the inside out requires a willingness to let ourselves be a work in progress. So for now, start with self-awareness, what do you notice about your patterns? What does it mean about you when you find yourself emotional eating? Get curious. Journal. Spend time in deeper self-reflection. When we can become aware of our patterns, as well as the negative internalized beliefs more clearly we can begin to dive deeper and deeper into the exploration of emotions. This is the work required to truly heal from emotional eating. I hope you find some time to be present with your patterns, your self, and I’ll be back soon with more specific ways to help explore emotions fully and deeply as you continue along your healing journey.

How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 7: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

Principle 7 of Intuitive Eating is: Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness. This is a big one—and one of the most challenging as emotions and food often get entangled. It can be much more challenging to discern emotional eating from say a hunger or full cue as you are working with the principles of intuitive eating. Emotional eating can also become tangled up in specific thought pattern or a belief (or lie) about a diet as you are working to reject diet mentality.

Coping with your emotions with kindness allows an opportunity for food to be just food. It’s another simple but not so easy concept as you are working towards not using food as a coping skill to manage your internal emotional experiences that create discomfort and challenges. This process of coping with emotions with kindness is about understanding, listening to, receiving the messages from and responding to your emotions in a nonjudgmental and compassionate way.  This process really allows you to delve deeply into the root of emotional eating.

Many of us learned very early in our lives to believe and feel that our emotions are invalid, inconvenient, dramatic or unnecessary based on how they you were treated when expressing your emotions as a child. If you heard, “you’re too sensitive” “you’re so dramatic” “I don’t have time for this (temper tantrum, crying spell and so on…” “I’ll give you something to cry about” “crybaby” or “turn on the tears and see if you get your way” just to name a few, then you were taught a negative message about feeling and expressing your emotions. This becomes the root of emotional eating (or any other negative coping pattern).

These statements are unfortunately quite common, and all are quite damaging, especially when heard repeatedly. It begins to feel futile or unsafe to express your feelings and then eventually you either up the expressions in an attempt to be heard or stop and cut yourself off from you emotions all together.

The point here is definitely not to place blame, that just creates a sense of being a victim and creates a feeling of helplessness. The point here is to allow yourself to understand where you picked up the belief that your emotions were not valid, inconvenient etc... The point is to develop awareness as to where your relationship to your emotions became uncomfortable or all together denied. When you avoid or deny yourself the experience of feeling your feelings, you learn to stuff, numb, suppress and repress your emotions rather than express them in a healthy manner. You deserve to feel all of your feelings and all of your feelings are valid. Period. However, what you do with them and how you respond to your emotions can make a huge impact on the quality of your life.

If you feel completely at a loss when it comes to naming, understanding, identifying and exposing your emotions, that is ok! You can do an internet search for a feelings wheel and download and print it out to begin to become more familiar with emotions in general. This process can feel daunting at first because if you learned to repress your feelings from a young age you most likely have been working hard to keep them deeply suppressed, locked away deep inside never to be seen again. However, feelings don’t just go away, they are all still there and ready for you to open yourself to understanding, accepting and managing them in healthy way. I recommend you use the following process to begin the process of becoming more comfortable with your feelings/emotions simply as a concept. Then you can begin to explore your own in relation to your life more in depth. 

To start, go through the feelings wheel and list each feeling in a journal, one by one, starting at the center of the wheel. Write down after the feeling name a time you remember feeling that way or something that might create that feeling inside you. Then write down where you feel that feeling in your body (it’s ok if this isn’t clear right away, just try). Write down the opposite feeling state (e.g. angry—peaceful, happy—sad) for each feeling. After completing this exercise with all of the feelings on the wheel, use this journal daily as a place to release your feelings.

Our feelings/emotions show up as a message about how we are experiencing our lives. They are incredibly valuable information. It’s super important to use the concept of nonjudgment with your emotions/feelings. When you categorize your feelings as good or bad you are more likely to attempt to avoid the “bad” feelings. However, if you are nonjudgmental in your view of your emotions they can be more accessible to understand.

Your feelings may be experienced as comfortable or uncomfortable. It’s human nature to want to avoid feeling uncomfortable. As you become more familiar with feeling states, it will be helpful to begin to get more comfortable with the discomfort of your emotions. This is where your feelings journal will be helpful. You can use the following exercise to more clearly understand and then release your feelings. Try using the process each day to reflect on an emotional experience you had (or are having) and write down:

• Name the emotion you are experiencing/experienced.

• Where do/did you feel this in your body?

• How uncomfortable is/was this feeling on a scale of 0-10? (0 being no distress present and 10 being as uncomfortable as possible)

• What messages did you receive about this feeling growing up (or in your current life)?

• What is the message this emotion has for you now, what does it want you to know?

• What does this feeling/emotion need?

• Can you give the emotion what it needs, why or why not?

• Is there something you can do to cope with this feeling in a healthy way?

• Can you let this feeling go/release it?

• What is the opposite feeling state?

• Is it possible to do something now to cultivate this opposite feeling state in this moment?

• How uncomfortable is your original feeling now on a scale of 0-10?

After going through this daily as an exercise in self-awareness and self-reflection, begin to apply it to when you are having a specific food craving. Notice if you are able to release the feelings in a healthy way, trusting that this becomes more comfortable and possible with practice.

Emotional awareness is a process and learning to identify and cope with your feelings can have a tremendously positive impact on your life, your relationships, and your relationship with food. As you open yourself to the inner workings of your emotional world, you begin to free and liberate yourself from any fear and shame you experienced in terms of expressing your feelings in your past.

Know that this is just the beginning. If you feel there is too much to uncover, it’s difficult to get in touch with your feelings or they have been too suppressed for too long, know that you can seek support, you do not have to go through this hard work alone. Find a therapist, a coach or a trusted mentor and receive the support you need. This work is tremendously powerful and you deserve to feel, appreciate, understand and experience all of your feelings.

How to Integrate Intuitive Eating Principle 4: Challenge the Food Police

I hope you are finding the deep dive into the principles of intuitive eating created by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch to be helpful, eye opening and thought provoking when it comes to your relationship with food. Today I’ll be exploring the fourth principle of intuitive eating: Challenge the Food Police. This principle is really all about embracing nonjudgment of your food choices and releasing fear, judgment and shame as it relates to food.

The food police are deeply entrenched in diet culture rules, regulations and beliefs about food. The food police tend to show up when you make a particular food choice and then will label that choice as good or bad—which we know only causes an internalization those feelings and creates a projection of how you will feel about yourself. This plays into feeling superior or inferior in relation to your choices rather than grounded and accepting, which is how you might prefer to feel.

The food police can be an external force as well. The people, books, studies and otherwise that will make comments about your choices, question your choices, praise you for making a “good” choice and maybe look at you a bit funny or even make a comment—with judgment—if you are making what they perceive as a “bad” choice. All of this only perpetuates stigma around food, body image and ultimately creates internalized feelings of guilt and shame.

Guilt shows up as your conscience. Guilt is an appropriate and helpful emotion to feel if you’ve actually done something wrong. Let’s say you are frustrated and take out that frustration on someone you care about and speak unkindly to them. You may experience feelings of guilt. That person did not deserve to be spoken to in that way, and most likely if you weren’t frustrated you would not have reacted in this way.

The guilt you experience is a helpful compass that signals to you that the way you acted was not in alignment with how you want to treat others or show up in the world. Now you have a choice to respond to that emotion. You can rectify your behavior through an apology. Following your apology you can show a concerted effort to change your behavior. The next time you feel frustrated, you can determine how to more appropriately and effectively cope with, manage and express that emotion.

I know this guilt talk has been a bit of a detour, however, it’s important to understand the nature and need of guilt. Guilt is helpful if you’ve actually done something wrong. If you eat a cookie, you are not doing anything bad or wrong and more importantly you are not a bad person for making that choice. The guilt that may show up from the food police in your head or around you however may make it difficult to wade through and clarify these feelings for yourself. Recognizing the amount of guilt you experience when it comes to your food choices allows you to explore your own food police more rationally and in depth.

What’s even worse is that the food police work through guilt and shame and when those feelings become internalized it can lead to emotional eating patterns. These patterns increase feelings of guilt and shame and lead to things like eating in secret, feeling ashamed and an increase in food cravings on an intense and deep level. Listening to and believing the food police ultimately can lead to dangerous emotional eating patterns and overeating because they are bound up in the diet mentality, judgment and the concept of restriction. When you allow food to be just food and ditch the judgment you feel more grounded and balanced in your choices.

Noticing the food police is enhanced when you pair it with the practice of mindful eating. Making a choice about what to eat and then doing so in a way that allows you taste, enjoy and be present with your food—without judgment. Be aware of thoughts about what you are eating and try to align with the facts about it rather than any emotions or judgments.

Some nonjudgmental self-statements might sound like the following, practice using them to combat the food police in your head and those potentially around you:

• This food tastes good to me.

• This food provides nourishment.

• This food satisfies me.

• This food satiates me.

• This food makes me feel _______________(healthy, energized, grounded…)

Some ways you can practice speaking to yourself in a kind, food police revoking manner might sound like some of the following:

• Today I choose to honor my hunger.

• The food I choose is my choice.

• I trust my choices.

• I know what my body wants and needs.

• I will eat this food with a mindful focus and notice the effects it has on my body.

• I deserve to enjoy my food.

• I deserve to nourish my body.

When you engage in this process of mindful and intuitive eating you begin to strip away judgment, fear and shame. Ironically, you may find that you crave less and restrict less at the same time.

For this week, practice noticing the food police while you are eating one mindful meal or snack. Be aware of any feelings of guilt and challenge them, ask yourself, “have I actually done anything wrong?” Take notes and see how you can transition to speaking to yourself internally in a nonjudgmental and compassionate way when it comes your food choices and your body. Begin using some of these self-statements and feel the internal shift that comes with this powerful practice.