Google “emotional eating” and you’ll immediately see articles like “Stop Eating Over Your Emotions” and “Emotional Eating: 9 Ways to Stop It”.
Typical thinking has us believing that if we are engaging in unwanted or destructive behavior that we need to STOP ourselves.
I understand the urgency. After all, smoking, drinking alcohol and overspending could have some devastating impact on our health, relationships, bank accounts and careers. “Stopping” seems to be the right course of action.
I first ate emotionally when I was in middle school. In the decades that followed, I tried to stop myself. I tried to stay away from certain foods, afraid that if I started to eat one bite, one serving or one scoop, I’d be caught up in an eating frenzy that wouldn’t end well. I learned to demonize certain foods because of how weak and out of control they made me.
Trying to stop eating emotionally made me just focus on food and eating. I’d try to get more regimented with my diet by calorie counting and meal planning.
A part of me knew that my emotional eating patterns weren’t just about my sugar cravings. I even suspected they came from a deep and dark place (a place I was afraid to explore). But I didn’t know what to say to that quiet voice that just wanted my weekly eating binges to stop. They were too freakin’ painful. I was afraid of gaining weight and I hated my bloated belly.
Eventually, I stopped wanting to stop and began to see what was really happening with my emotional eating patterns. Yes, this took a big leap of faith and a lot of trust.
When I kept trying to stop myself from eating emotionally, I was really fighting the wrong battle. I made food the enemy and my lack of discipline it’s accomplice.
I now know that emotional eating is an opportunity to get curious around what’s really going on. It’s a door that you get to walk through to get to know yourself, recognize feelings that you didn’t know you had, uncover beliefs and patterns that don’t serve you and heal from a deep place.
Ultimately, when you’ve walked through this door, you move beyond emotional eating. The drive to soothe yourself with just food may get replaced with other practices. You learn how to be with emotions instead of needing them to go away.
There is no fight or battle. No need to stay away from certain foods to avoid the risk of feeling out of control. Instead, you learn a new way to support yourself.
I don’t know about you, but why would you want to stop yourself from that?