Emotional Eating – An Update
This afternoon I have been reviewing some of the comments and emails that I was sent back when I was writing thoughts about emotional eating, and my own journey with that, and other forms of it – compulsive eating, eating when not hungry, etc.
I realize I haven’t updated on that in a while, and I will. For those of you who are new to the blog since then, I will update you briefly. For me, it has always been food that I have used to numb, calm, distract, and occupy. I have used it to substitute for love, attention, comfort, or whatever else I have needed but haven’t yet formulated a way to get.
I was a compulsive/emotional eater my entire life. Since coming to veganism and eventually raw foods, paired with an increasingly introspective look at my life, I have been focused on healing this. The last juice feast was a huge milestone, and functioned wonderfully for me to be able to step back from the drama that food played/plays in my life. In this removed, observational space, I cleared many psycho-spiritual issues, thought patterns, and imbalances in my life that underlay my use of food. In the last year and 3 months since I ended the Juice Feast, I have kept true to all the new patterns I decided to create, and used all the much better tools I formulated to deal with the things that I previously used food for.
Even now I still use food. It’s been about five years since the day I realized I didn’t actually know what hunger felt like; and how much I ate emotionally. Today I still use food sometimes, and I am developing better habits to deal. My main thing is to journal. I write a LOT. Here is a list of some other things I’ve started doing.. perhaps you’ll find a tool or two Some things might seem odd… yet they help, for some reason…
Call a friend
Take a bath
Take a hot tub
Read a comforting book
Ask for a hug (a long one)
Cry (which for me usually ends with meditating, after all the emotions are let out)
Drink grounding herbal tea, or take other grounding herbs
Put on calming music
Drink a quart of water
Do 10 minutes of yoga
Lay in the sun
Go for a walk
Find somewhere in nature to be – nature often resolves most of my issues more effortlessly than my own brain
Breathe reeeeeally deeply for several minutes
Paint, draw, or do something creative
Meditate (for me, this happens AFTER I’ve done something else to let out the emotion I’m dealing with)
Watch a comforting movie
I used to think there was something wrong with me if I chose to employ some of the above things to help me deal with emotions. I figured I was weak if I just traded one crutch (food) for another. I was choosing not to use food, but expecting myself to be able to substitute absolutely nothing in the place of food. But soon I realized how unkind it was to tell myself that I should be able to make a jump like that. As if I were just learning how to walk, yet berating myself for not being an Olympian marathon runner yet.
Yes, ultimately, I would like to be able to deal with every single emotion I have right then and there and resolve it, without anyone or anything. And I do that sometimes. Yet I’ve realized that compassion and patience, both things I typically give to everyone but myself, are extremely important.
Sometimes emotions and situations are just to big for me to deal with all at once. I take them in chunks. I deal with as big a chunk as I can in that moment, usually journal about it, then I need some help, thus employing some other strategy. Sometimes I need to zone out to a movie, or to have someone hold me. And for me, right now, that’s totally ok
With kindness,
Courtney