Understanding and Ending Your Emotional Eating
Hi friends. Welcome back. So today we’re going to really dive into emotional eating. What is emotional eating? Let’s talk about that first. Okay. The way that I see emotional eating is when you feel any million different feelings and you feel uncomfortable, even if it’s a positive emotion and you’re getting so uncomfortable that you begin to eat when you’re not physically hungry.
You may get the thought that you want to, or need to eat, and you may confuse it with hunger, but there’s no true physical hunger. There it’s a feeling that’s coming from an emotion, which comes from a thought that you’re thinking. So physical hunger comes from a sensation in your body. And that sensation gives a signal to your mind that you’re hungry in both cases of physical hunger and emotional hunger.
You get a message that you should eat, but only in true physical hunger, does it come from an emptiness in your stomach? And ideally that is when you should eat. If you eat when your body gives you that empty signal, your body will want and take in exactly the right amount of food to support your natural weight.
No weighing, no counting, no measuring, you know, your body knows. So if you eat, when your mind gives you the sing signal that you should escape an emotional feeling instead of the physical, physical sensation. Then you’re giving your body food. It does not need, and that food will be stored as fat. And that’s what creates your extra weight and the habit of eating emotionally more than your body needs.
You can do this. One part of your brain is going to is going to give you that signal to run away and to grab food. But it takes another part of your brain that actually can enable you to get up and go get the food. Two different parts of your, your brain. So you never actually have to do it. You don’t actually have to eat just like when you struggle with binge eating, it’s all signals from your brain that have nothing to do with hunger and you can notice them without responding to.
But you have to go through your feelings to get out on the other side, the longer you hold back and ignore those feelings, the bigger and stronger and more threatening they feel. But they’re really just emotions caused by your thoughts. They’re just concepts going around in your mind. They have no power unless you latch onto them and make the choice to believe.
So in our work on emotional eating, the first step is to understand it, why it happens, what it means, where it comes from and why you do it. If you can see from what we talked about today, that this description fits you. Don’t worry because understanding it is the first step. The next step is seeing what’s happening as it’s happening when you want to eat.
And there’s no real hunger, you’ll know what’s going on and you’ll know that you’re just experiencing an emotion and you do not have to run away from it. It’s just what you’ve been, what you’ve conditioned yourself to do. So friends, please try this. Just allow it, just sit with the feeling, let it pass through you and then eat the next time you have true physical hunger.
We’re gonna be working on many different aspects of emotional eating this year, but for now just understanding it and recognizing when you do it and knowing that you don’t have to go down that road. That’s a really excellent start. If you notice that you wanna escape into food frequently. When there’s no hunger, please don’t beat yourself up because there’s no gain in doing that.
Just notice it and just be gently curious about what you’re doing, seeing it is the first step to ending it. Need help getting back on track? Let’s talk about it in our coaching call! Schedule with me HERE.