Why do we eat emotionally? What is happening when we use food as a coping strategy or tool to get an internal need met? So often we develop strong emotional connections with food that are related to love, acceptance and comfort.
These connections are made early in our lives and often stay with us unconsciously throughout our entire lifetimes.
We see food as our grandmother or mother's love and kindness, or as the friend we never had and needed or even as a way to "stuff" painful emotions like anger, loneliness, or grief.
We develop a relationship with food that is very personal and very real to us.
To stop emotional eating, we need to understand our own personal relationship to food.
What I have found is that no amount of insight into the problem is enough to stop doing the behavior.
I think that is where a lot of other truly great therapies and programs fail.
Insight is not going to change the desire to quench a very powerful emotional response in most cases.
You can feel the truth of this every time you go to the food to eat when you aren't hungry, right? You know you aren't hungry or shouldn't eat all those cookies daily if you want to lose the weight but you just can't stop.
You may also know that it is a habit that has developed because you feel overwhelmed and stressed, but doesn't that help you to stop doing it I would guess, at least not permanently.
Probably not if you are like many of the clients that I work with daily.
To begin to heal or change this relationship with food here are some good questions you can ask.
1.
What does food represent to you? 2.
Where did you first learn that, or feel that food represented that to you? Next, I use a tool called EFT- Emotional Freedom Technique to begin to address the feelings and thoughts about food and what it represents and actually release them.
We do this through simple tapping with our fingertips on traditional acupuncture meridian end points on the face and body as we feel or say the emotions or thought we are experiencing.
Once you are on target with how you feel, tapping can be relatively simple and fast in releasing emotion.
However, emotional release is the first step.
The next important step is to reframe or shift our perception about food and what it represents to us to a more empowering or freeing belief.
So in other words, if food represented love to you, you might then come to realize after tapping that food can never give you the love that you desire and that only you or others can.
Sounds simple I know, but everyone is unique in how this plays out and it is important that the representations be your own.
Because tapping addresses a deeper subconscious level to our thoughts, beliefs and emotions the shifts in perception are not surface but seem to be permanent and lasting.
In this way I see clients find a new way to deal with their old patterns with food and stop emotional eating for good.
These connections are made early in our lives and often stay with us unconsciously throughout our entire lifetimes.
We see food as our grandmother or mother's love and kindness, or as the friend we never had and needed or even as a way to "stuff" painful emotions like anger, loneliness, or grief.
We develop a relationship with food that is very personal and very real to us.
To stop emotional eating, we need to understand our own personal relationship to food.
What I have found is that no amount of insight into the problem is enough to stop doing the behavior.
I think that is where a lot of other truly great therapies and programs fail.
Insight is not going to change the desire to quench a very powerful emotional response in most cases.
You can feel the truth of this every time you go to the food to eat when you aren't hungry, right? You know you aren't hungry or shouldn't eat all those cookies daily if you want to lose the weight but you just can't stop.
You may also know that it is a habit that has developed because you feel overwhelmed and stressed, but doesn't that help you to stop doing it I would guess, at least not permanently.
Probably not if you are like many of the clients that I work with daily.
To begin to heal or change this relationship with food here are some good questions you can ask.
1.
What does food represent to you? 2.
Where did you first learn that, or feel that food represented that to you? Next, I use a tool called EFT- Emotional Freedom Technique to begin to address the feelings and thoughts about food and what it represents and actually release them.
We do this through simple tapping with our fingertips on traditional acupuncture meridian end points on the face and body as we feel or say the emotions or thought we are experiencing.
Once you are on target with how you feel, tapping can be relatively simple and fast in releasing emotion.
However, emotional release is the first step.
The next important step is to reframe or shift our perception about food and what it represents to us to a more empowering or freeing belief.
So in other words, if food represented love to you, you might then come to realize after tapping that food can never give you the love that you desire and that only you or others can.
Sounds simple I know, but everyone is unique in how this plays out and it is important that the representations be your own.
Because tapping addresses a deeper subconscious level to our thoughts, beliefs and emotions the shifts in perception are not surface but seem to be permanent and lasting.
In this way I see clients find a new way to deal with their old patterns with food and stop emotional eating for good.