Part 7 Eating and Your Needs and Emotions: Based on the book "Intuitive Eating Workbook"
Many people believe that they are compulsive overeaters or binge eaters because they watch themselves eat excessively. In fact, many of these people are misdiagnosing themselves. Before you can explore the emotional connections you may have with eating, it’s first imperative to determine whether your non-attuned eating is actually based on difficulties you are having handling emotions. Or, rather, is it a consequence of lacking self-care or of the deprivation you feel from a lingering diet mentality? If self-care is lacking, it’s hard to be attuned and accurately hear the inner cues of hunger and fullness. Under these circumstances, food can become more rewarding. Self care also includes sleep which for an adult, is seven to nine hours. If you are not consistently getting adequate sleep, it’s likely that you’re walking around feeling lethargic, with low energy. Many people who are sleep deprived believe that their lack of energy can be corrected by eating more. And while it’s true that digested food releases physical energy from calories to keep the body functioning and to perform daily tasks, extra food doesn’t compensate for a lack of sleep. Eating doesn’t wake you up—in fact, it can actually make you feel more sluggish and drowsy. Sometimes it feels like an impossible task to keep all the balls rolling in your life. Often this is a problem of abundance. There may be many aspects of your life that appeal to you, but you may not have the time for them all. Or it could be an abundance of life’s problems. In either case, make it an important goal to be realistic about how much time you can spend in any one area of your life. When you eat consistently and adequately, you’ll avoid entering a state of primal hunger, which often results in overeating when your brain senses semi-starvation. Many aspects of life can cause stress—work or school deadlines, moving, separation or divorce, a health crisis for yourself or a family member, or the death of someone close—and stress can have a serious impact on your eating and your health. Looking at your life fully and finding the problems that may be affecting your eating—and their solutions—is essential for moving forward in your quest to attune to your body’s signals of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction in eating. Without this examination of your life, you may be making the wrong assumption that your eating is purely emotionally based. When you are stealth deprived, the habits and patterns of the diet mentality are still rooted in the back of your mind, even though you have tried to eradicate them. Feeling deprived of food (either in the variety or in the amount of food) puts you at risk for overeating, and overeating, of course, often initiates a vicious cycle: food restriction as compensation, rebounding in more overeating, and so forth. If you are still struggling with the automatic thought that some foods are good or bad, remember that this is a cognitive distortion that has been reinforced by years of diet mentality and by our culture. If you have discovered that some of your disconnected eating is associated with issues of self-care or deprivation from a lingering dieting mentality, there is more work to be done in these areas. Remember, it takes patience and practice. It is best to address these issues before trying to tackle any problems you have with emotional eating. It’s much easier to navigate the ups and downs in life when your self-care is in place and the dieting mentality is behind you. It is important to remember that eating does not occur in a void. Much of the time, food has emotional associations. We often forget how deeply food is tied to the need for comfort and safety. This association deepens when food is offered to soothe aches, celebrate events, and show love—when food becomes a comfort, a reward, and a reliable friend. Emotional eating covers a wide spectrum of emotions. It can be as positive as pleasure when eating a slice of wedding cake or as destructive as eating to numb difficult feelings or even to punish yourself as a result of negative self-talk. It is important to acknowledge how emotional eating has served you. This is the first step toward healing the negative feelings you have about yourself in relation to eating. If you appreciate that you were actually trying to take care of yourself by using or restricting food, when you know no other way, it will help you to mourn the loss of the behavior as you give it up. And at the same time, it will help you to develop a sense of compassion for your struggle. There are many emotional triggers for eating, and it’s likely that most people eat emotionally from time to time: anxiety—using food to calm yourself boredom—eating as something to do bribery—“finish this task, and you can have a treat” celebration—food accompanies most events emptiness—eating from a lack of spiritual meaning, excitement—using food as something fun feeling lonely or unloved—using food as a friend frustration, anger, rage—eating as a release loosening the reins—eating as an outlet from a self-imposed militaristic or perfectionist life mild depression—carbohydrates can increase serotonin—the “feel better” neuro- transmitter self-soothing when upset—eating as a comforting or consoling activity procrastination—“I’ll do that task after I eat something” reward—“I just closed that deal—now I deserve that big piece of chocolate cake” stress—food for relief. Part of getting to know your emotional feelings is familiarizing yourself with how these feelings are experienced in your body. There are three main paths to learning to cope with your feelings without using food: learning to sit with your feelings, helpful distraction, self-care, nurturance, and compassion are fundamental to being able to cope with your emotions without using food—they must be established before moving on. They require a belief that not only do you have emotional needs but also that your needs are important and that you have a right to have them met. Without this belief, and without cultivating selfcare, nurturance, and compassion, you are likely to continue or return to using food—your original source of comfort and nurturance. There are many basic human needs that people often deny, but they are essential for selfcare: enough sleep and rest, sensual pleasure, expression of feelings, in order to be heard, understood, and accepted intellectual and creative stimulation comfort and warmth reminds you that you should not expect progress to move in a straight line. You will sometimes experience a return to earlier types of behavior, but you should not consider these to be setbacks. When your forward progress loops around into one of these old patterns, look at that movement with curiosity. Use these loops—with their returns to old behavior—to reexamine your beliefs and self-talk and to look again at what you need for self-care. Having an outlook of self-compassion is an essential part of this path to healing emotional eating. When you practice self-care, feel nurtured in the ways that are unique to your life, and speak to yourself with compassion, you will find that eating may no longer serve as your primary source of nurturance. It will become just a way to meet your hunger needs, while providing you pleasure and satisfaction. Along with the types of self-nurturance listed above, you can create a nurturing experience at any moment by imagining a location where you have felt completely calm. This might be at the beach or hiking on a beautiful mountain path. Maybe you’re sitting on your couch, wrapped in a soft blanket and listening to music. Or maybe you’re at a theater, watching a play or movie. For some people, it can be an overwhelming task to figure out what you’re feeling when you aren’t hungry, yet you want to eat, or when you are in the middle of a meal and have had enough to satisfy your physical hunger, but you want to eat more of the delicious food. For some people, however, this situation can be a challenge that offers them a window into their inner world.
