Ending emotional eating, part 3

Okay, so a few weeks ago, we talked about what emotional eating is and how to begin identifying the differences between emotional vs. physical hunger.

Today, we are going to start thinking about fueling our bodies and really setting the stage for the different things that might make us more vulnerable to emotional eating. Later on, as we continue this series, we’ll also talk more about ways of coping with emotions in a healthy way that starts to diffuse the need for finding comfort through food.

Now that you can identify a bit easier what physical hunger feels like in your body, from Part 2 of this blog series, you likely have a better sense of when you feel hungry throughout the day and maybe even what foods you start to turn to when you’re feeling hungry. One vulnerability to emotional eating can be when we let ourselves get SO hungry that we are making impulsive and rash choices around food. This can also cause us to overeat and become uncomfortable, which only continues that cycle of again allowing ourselves to become too hungry. Have you ever heard that phrase, “I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse!” Not a good place to be when we are trying to make mindful, intentional decisions around food.

One way of decreasing that vulnerability is by staying within that range I proposed, between a 3-7 on the hunger-fullness scale. How do you stay within that scale? Well, for starters, that might look like eating every few hours, so that your blood sugar levels are never dropping off or spiking in drastic ways throughout the day. It can also look like balance, which may mean eating appropriate, recommended portions of your foods (remember, ALL foods fit into this philosophy!) rather than too little or too much. It will look like eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as a few snacks throughout the day, and getting a balance of different foods from the various food group families. It means not depriving yourself, or “saving up calories” or even counting calories or macros at all. Intuitive eating comes from listening to your body, not calculations or numbers or even the time on the clock.

That may be a difficult thing for many people to accept, knowing how the diet culture influences so many things in our society today. Calories are posted on pretty much every menu you see, and we’re so aware of what is “bad” or “unhealthy” in foods around us. This next step really involves a conscious effort and choice at removing these judgments and removing the influence of some of these other food qualifiers.

When you go to Starbucks or to a restaurant for lunch or dinner, can you honestly say that you order what you WANT on the menu, and that the calorie postings next to the food options you choose don’t influence what you pick? It can take a while to get to that place, and it takes a lot of hard work to retrain your mind to see ALL foods as important and necessary.

When it comes to intuitive eating, we are teaching our bodies and our minds that food isn’t what holds power. Food by itself is not special - WE make it that way. Food is food. We ourselves place important and emphasis on it, and THAT is what creates these ideas of food being good or bad. I sometimes say to my clients that I wouldn’t recommend someone only lives on cake, the same way I wouldn’t recommend that someone only lives on carrots. Everything in our lives must include moderation, flexibility, and a healthy dose of forgiveness. Anytime shame starts to enter the picture, especially when it comes to food, we find ourselves in a dangerous place where polarization can start to take place. It’s in that place of judgment and shame where emotional decisions and black-and-white thinking around food (and our bodies!) can really evolve. Over time, learning to identify those tendencies with a good eating disorder therapist and dietitian, AND learning how to re-train your brain to have a positive and healthy relationship with your body and with food, you can start to see that shift from judgment and shame to acceptance and compassion.

How have you been doing this holiday season? I’d love to hear what your challenges and successes have been. Please leave us a note below in the comments, and don’t hesitate to reach out to make an appointment, if you’d like to discuss any of these topics further.

Ending emotional eating, part 2

So, we defined what emotional eating is in a prior blog post. I think this can genuinely be a confusing topic sometimes because food IS attached to emotion. We all have experiences with food that give us positive (and maybe even negative) feelings. When food is so intricately tied into our holidays, birthdays, and other celebrations, it DOES take on an emotional quality. There is nothing wrong with this, and the first myth I want to dispel is that eating should be done in a robotic or controlled, rigid way. It’s not just fuel; it is so much more. And, the beauty of having a healthy relationship with food is being able to experience these positive emotions without letting them control how we act around food.

Now, how do we dive in to tackling this and addressing issues related to emotional eating?

Well, we need to build awareness. Awareness of what, you might ask yourself.

Good question!

We need to find out WHAT is going on when the urge to eat hits. Do you know how to gauge your hunger and fullness cues? This is an amazing gift that we are given as babies and children. Then, along the way, this gauge can start to get a little distorted. Rather than reading what is happening within the body, we start to look to the clock, to others, and to society to tell us when we’re hungry, what we’re hungry for, when we’re full, and so on and so forth.

If you have little kids or have ever been around them, you’ll see that their eating patterns can sometimes look erratic. Yes, it IS true that if you only let a child eat popsicles and mac ‘n cheese, they will start to develop some not-so-healthy habits. AND, it’s also true that if you let them eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full, their eating may differ from one day to the next. Heck, one hour to the next! They can listen to their bodies in a very intuitive way because they are still so present in their bodies. This is a natural-born gift that we all come into the world with. We’ve seen with breastfed babies specifically that there is a symbiotic relationship that happens between child and mom; the child eats to fullness, and then mom’s body adjusts to make the appropriate amount of milk that baby says he needs. We have this very special gift that often falls away as we age, due to all of the other pressures and emotions that start to infiltrate our relationship with food and the act of eating.

To get back to this, it’s important to begin to identify what physical vs. emotional hunger feels like. Physical hunger has physical cues. When you notice that your tummy is growling, you’re feeling faint or weak, or maybe you start to get a headache - these are all physical signs that your body is in need of food. Emotional signs of hunger may come in the form of cravings, thoughts about food, and emotions around food. When we are physically hungry, there isn’t much pickiness that occurs. If you need fuel, you will take that fuel in the form that you can get at whatever moment in time it is. This is why it’s also important that we don’t allow ourselves, in trying to become an intuitive and mindful eater, to really get too hungry where we end up making ineffective choices around food. A good range to stay between on a 1-10 hunger to fullness scale would be staying between a 3-7. A three on the scale might look like a little bit of stomach talk, some thoughts about food and eating, and a physical sensation of hunger. It shouldn’t feel like a starving, gnawing hunger, which might look more like a 1 or 2 on that scale. A seven would be equivalent to being satiated, satisfied, full but not uncomfortable. When we begin to feel bloated, uncomfortable, sleepy, and perhaps in pain, we might find that we are between an 8-10 on that hunger-fullness scale.

Every person is different, so beginning to identify what hunger and fullness feels like in your OWN body is a great start to ending emotional eating. This first step won’t guarantee that you’ll stop engaging in emotional eating behaviors right away…that takes time and practice. However, beginning to differentiate between what physical and emotional hunger feels like is definitely the first step. One question to ask yourself, if you suspect that you are feeling emotionally hungry, is:

What else am I craving in my life right now?

Are you looking for connection from others? Intimacy? Closeness? Space or self-care? Are you currently in need of some quiet, alone time? Some time to slow down and relax? Time to be active?

When we can start to identify our needs - our needs in relationships, interactions with others, and emotional, spiritual, and psychological needs - we can start to find that maybe we’ve been using food as a way to meet those unrelated and very real needs. We can fall victim to emotional eating when we start to confuse these needs with our physical need to eat, and because food is never a substitute for relationships, connection, belonging, self-care, and beyond - we may find ourselves trapped in that vicious cycle of endlessly using food as a way to fill that hole. Once we start to become aware of this, we can start to meet those other emotional needs in the way that will truly satisfy them.

Stay tuned as we continue to identify ways of tackling our emotional eating through this month of November!

Ending emotional eating, part 1

I’ve been thinking about starting a small series of blog posts on emotional eating, especially as we are coming into this holiday season. Food is plentiful during this time, and often we categorize these holiday foods as “bad” - candy and sweets after Halloween, turkey and all the fix-in’s for Thanksgiving, and the cookies, cakes, and breads that adorn the month of December.

How do I relate to food?

Do you think it could be possible that you could have a relationship with food that allows you to eat ALL of these things, in moderation, and without guilt, shame, or judgment? Do you think it’s also possible to stop looking at foods as “good” or “bad” and start to just see them as fuel?

Whoa.

I feel like for some of us, that may feel like such a foreign concept that you might be laughing at your screen. Out loud. Wondering what kind of crazy pills I’m on.

Some of you may also be saying to yourself that you don’t want to eat foods in the “bad” category. You may be equating these particular foods or holiday events with fear, anxiety, or dread - feeling like having to eat them is a punishment or hurdle. Perhaps you can’t even see the value in having an “everything in moderation” approach to your relationship with food.

Emotional eating

Emotional eating, in its definition, is when we allow our emotions to control or decide our behaviors around food. That could mean restricting our intake of food, due to fears or avoidance. It could also be binging or overeating food, due to other emotions that we might be working to soothe through the comfort that food can often bring us. Either way, when we attach emotions to food as our primary means of relating to it, we end up moving away from allowing our intuition to drive the bus. Instead, we end up in a distant relationship with our intuition - not really knowing what we’re thinking, feeling, or craving - and finding that we are hard-pressed to make mindful decisions about what we choose to eat.

mindfulness

Mindfulness is really the act of intentionally being present, without judgment. When we pair that with behaviors around food, it’s about choosing foods, thinking about foods, and eating foods in an intentional, present-focused, and nonjudgmental way. Can you think of the last time you thoroughly enjoyed food in this way??

There is a lot that goes into mindfulness when it comes to emotional eating. Emotional eating, in its full range, also encompasses a lot of other topics that I will have to probably make later blog posts or a series on - topics like body image, self-compassion, and weight bias. But for now, I hope that by introducing this idea of emotional eating we can start to explore it through this month in ways that will be helpful to you - to help you start to change your own perceptions about and behaviors around food, to ultimately lead toward a more nonjudgmental and intuitive approach to your eating patterns.