Emotional Eating Part 2

Emotional Eating 2 of 2.  How to Heal, How To Hear

Regardless of whether you’ve been dieting since you were 12, or have never stepped on a scale in your life, you’ve been influenced by the diet mentality that is so prevalent in our culture.  This mass mind-state can cause us to view hunger with suspicion, even hostility.  Instead we rely on other peoples ideas and opinions of how we are to eat and treat our bodies.  We chose meals based on what we’ve already eaten, on what we’ve read in a magazine or recommendations from our trainers or mothers who have also been influenced by other people’s ideas.  The biggest problem I see with this mentality is that it separates us from our bodies.  We begin to listen to outside voices instead of what our bodies are telling us we really need.  We ignore the physiological signals from our bodies that we are empty or full, and we lose the ability to decide for ourselves what is right.  I have to wonder, from this disconnect, what other inner voices we begin to ignore.  If everyone outside of us has our answers, when do we stop listening to our inner knowing?  One of the simplest suggestions I give emotional eaters is to just eat when they are hungry, stop when they are full.  Yet most people have ignored their own inner guidance for so long that they have no idea where to even begin.  Recognizing hunger and fullness is hard for many people. 

Shifting your awareness from the outside to inside takes time, patience, and effort.  There is no grater feeling of empowerment than learning how to trust your inner nudges, and that you really do have an inner guidance system that knows exactly what you need and how much.  Begin by simply asking yourself when presented with food, “Am I hungry?” Check your mouth, throat, and abdomen.  If you feel hungry, give yourself permission to eat.  When you’re hungry, sit down with a healthy meal and do what I call, “mindful eating”.  This is where you sit with your food with no distractions.  You notice the colors of the food.  You appreciate the immense effort that nature took to provide you with edible plants. Allow yourself to enjoy the flavors, the textures.  Allow yourself to be relaxed with your plate, and congratulate yourself for eating healthy.  Think about the nutrients in the food and how they provide health and energy for your body.  As you chew each bite deliberately and enjoy every second of your plate, you will notice yourself feeling things like gratitude, love, appreciation, and joy in eating.  Something most people have forgotten how to feel about food.  You’ll realize that food is not the enemy.  It provides life and beauty to our lives.  Since emotional eaters are so used to feeling the opposite while binging on unhealthy foods, these new feelings of joy while mindful eating can also produce healthy chemicals in our brain that heal us rather than give us a “quick fix”.

Learning how to listen to our bodies is key for emotional eating.  When we eat because we are truly hungry, we stop when we are truly full.  We feel grateful for our food, and accept the energy and life that it provides.  Feeding emotional needs with food however, makes us feel that we are a bottomless well, never feeling full, never feeling satisfied.  And the motivation for eating never gets addressed.  For more information on health and wellness, please visit my website at www.clarityistheway.com. –Crystal Doty