Lots of us believe that we eat our feelings and need to get some control goddammit. But what is actually even more common, and way more detrimental, is using dieting and control to numb our feelings.
Dieting is one of the big ways we try to avoid feeling our bodies. It is a perfect storm of distraction, control, perfectionism, and the chemical high we get from adrenaline and other stress hormones when we restrict our food.Dieting is a way to disconnect us from our bodies and stifle our life force. Less food and higher stress hormones help us temporarily live with less feeling, not to mention all of the concentration and focus it takes to override your appetite and famine response. Dieting is a distraction.
All of the following tools and exercises are devoted to help you begin feeling. You are going to be doing enough work on habitually feeling emotions, and when you do that, emotional eating will lose its power. When you are committed to feeling emotions, the coping mechanisms you’ve used naturally begin to take a healthier role in your life.
We become dysfunctional with food, and it’s not usually because of emotional eating at all. It’s because of restriction, guilt, and the biological survival cycle that it induces—and also because of our deep fear of weight and taking up space. As long as you are getting out of reactive famine mode, and learning to feel instead of numb, you don’t need to worry about emotional eating.
Do not get stuck in the trap of worrying that you need to stop emotionally eating—that will become restriction. Just eat and feel. I also want to remind you that eating is never a problem in and of itself. Shift your attention instead to making sure you aren’t trying to numb or distract yourself with control, perfectionism, and dieting.
It’s also important to note that emotional eating and bingeing aren’t the same thing. In all of my experience working with so many, manyyyy people who believed that emotional eating was their problem . . . once they stopped restricting, they were able to see that emotional eating was not actually their core problem at all. Emotional eating is not the reason most people are so dysfunctional with food. The problem is the biological famine response and the yo-yo of restriction, which leads to bingeing. That is the thing to fix if you want to become normal with food.
Even if you worry that you tend to eat to numb, the answer is still never to restrict, because that will just start up the yo-yo again. In the physical part of the process (and always) the answer is eating. The answer now is also feeling.
The truth is, eating emotionally is actually perfectly healthy and normal. All humans eat emotionally. Your cravings and your body’s needs are directly affected by your mental state and your stress levels. You are meant to have the option to comfort yourself with food. You are not a robot eating battery pellets for energy.
Food is fuel and nutrition, but it is also allowed to be comforting and grounding. And eating food to comfort and fill you up or to connect with others is a nonissue when you’re not in a reactive binge/repent cycle. When you are actually feeding yourself and trusting your body, and your body actually trusts that it is being fed, comfort eating can just be a part of a very normal relationship with food.
For example, eating birthday cake is an emotional reason to eat food: celebration. And eating a big bowl of macaroni and cheese when you are tired and sad is a legitimate way to comfort and feed yourself.
Emotional eating will happen. It is part of being human. It is part of being a normal eater. It is part of assessing what we need in any given moment and trying to comfort ourselves. That will always be okay. The more neutral food becomes, the more your body will naturally, without thinking about it, balance and account for times when we eat emotionally or “more than we need.” That’s what a healthy balanced body and appetite does. You don’t need to do anything about it. Just eat. Just listen. Just trust that this eating thing ain’t that deep.
Emotional eating is not bingeing. The problem only comes when you feel guilty about emotional eating. That triggers the guilt-and-repent cycle: Feeling guilty for eating. Deciding to restrict a little to make up for it. Then all hell breaks loose. Then you’re back in the yo-yo. The bottom line is, don’t feel guilty about eating, because that will only perpetuate your dysfunction with food.
