8 years of teaching about food and the nervous system, and here is what I know!
I meet people daily who are proficient at addressing the symptoms of emotional eating.
They know how to shop for healthy life giving food, they know how to keep trigger foods out of the home. (one locks their kid’s snacks in the garage!)
They can even harness their willpower for diets, exercise plans and nutritionist created healing protocols.
Some of them even have deeply established self-compassion practices, so they are not turning on themselves after an emotional eating episode. (huge win!)
But what they are trying to control and manage are just the symptoms – the late night eating, the obsessive thinking about what’s in the fridge, the urges to rush to the gym and counteract it all…even the self-talk…
We can address symptoms all day long, but the tricky part is that if we don’t get to the bottom of the iceberg, if we don’t understand what is individually driving these eating behaviors, we are doomed to have them come back over and over again.
That’s how many of us make it to our 40s, 50’s…some of my students even into their 70’s swinging between one program and the next – going between putting all effort into their eating and movement protocols, or having everything go out the window. Needless to say, this is very distressing and causes many of them to feel like food is in their way, like they aren’t able to “be normal” at holidays and celebrations, that each time they eat out is a stressful time…and worst of all often they make it about themselves – believing that their body is broken, or that there is no way out.
Here’s what I know from teaching about food and the nervous system since 2015.
* Eating behaviors always have a somatic component that needs to be addressed.
* Eating behaviors are survival behaviors that for many of us were established in early childhood.
* Emotional eating is about emotions, but more specifically it’s about our ability to somatically host the energy of emotions – something that needs to be addressed both in the body and cognitively.
* Emotional eating is very much a personal fingerprint – no two people eat in the same dynamics, but because our nervous systems are wired similarly, the same practices support all of us to somatically be with the energy of emotion without it overwhelming us.
* Much of emotional eating causes shame and self-hatred, but it is also caused by shame and self-hatred as both responses happen in relationship and are then experienced in the body.
I will be speaking about this and more in my next How to Find Peace with Food Workshop.
I hope you join us live and if you can’t you will have a recording.
BTW enrollment is free if you own my book, just make sure you subscribe for the extra resources that come with the book and there will be a coupon code in the emails you get after!
If you are curious to to learn more and get the science behind why you eat the way you do I invite you to come and spend a couple of hours really getting the understanding and tools to help you step on the path to peace with food.
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