Welcome to my blog
Interview: Understanding Emotional Eating and Juice Feasting
Kristin Fraser interviews me about how juice cleansing can be a tool for healing compulsive eating. Kristin and I both share our extensive experiences with Juice Feasting!
Interview: Emotional Suppression and Binge Eating
Thanks to Jen Howk, host of The Face of the Deep podcast, for hosting me to talk about healing overeating!
“I Can’t Have Joy, But I Can Have Chocolate”
You are good enough for love, you can heal the reasons you don't have comfort, and you can find joy again. But it doesn't feel like that, when we're in this space.
You Can Learn to Listen to Your Body’s Signals
At first, learning to eat based on your body’s signals can feel like painting with a blindfold on. However, it is a type of sensitivity and a skill that you can learn.
Don’t Compare Yourself to People Who Seem “Together”
Do you think to yourself, "Why do I have all these messy emotions that other people don't seem to have?" This is a common thing my clients say to me when we start getting under the skin of their compulsive eating.
If You Didn’t Overeat Until Adulthood
While it is common for people with overeating issues to have started young, it is also just as common for the overeating to not have started until a person was a teenager, an adult, or even well into adulthood. Here’s why this happens.
Your Broken Heart and Your Food Addiction
All those who struggle with food addiction are, at their core, heartbroken. Your binge eating reveals that deep down, somewhere, your heart is broken. You may not currently be aware of this, but it's true.
You Were Emotionally Caged in Your Childhood
Being caged emotionally and energetically feels miserable for a child. Having some comfort food while in that cage helped us cope with the lack of freedom. This can create overeating patterns.
Healing Emotional Eating: Be Proud of Your Courage
If you are embarking on healing the root causes of emotional eating, you are brave and courageous, no matter how messy it all looks and feels. You're not too messy or too emotional, you are very brave and courageous.
How Do You Know if You’re Feeling Emotions?
How do I know if I'm feeling emotions? What does it look like to release emotions? A great indicator that you're properly feeling emotions and releasing them is if you look like a small child does when they are feeling emotions.
Food Addiction and Emotions You’re Afraid Of
Your emotions that you’re afraid you won’t survive are the very ones that, if you feel them, will heal your overeating. It's the feelings where you think "I can't go there" or "I can't handle those ones" which are the very ones you most need to go into to heal.
Understanding Your Emotions Isn’t Necessary to Heal Overeating
It is not necessary to understand your emotions before you feel them. Insisting on understanding our emotions before we feel and experience them slows the healing of overeating.
Grief and Binge Eating
We are afraid that our sadness will swallow us if we start feeling it. We're afraid it will create depression. We think that if we open that floodgate, we will drown in it. But these are fears that are not actually true.
Observing Feelings and Healing Emotional Eating
Observing emotions does not get the emotions into movement. The only thing that gets our emotions from stagnation and being stuck and into movement is experiencing the emotion.
If You Weren’t Abused, but You Still Overeat
Most of the clients I work with in healing overeating did not have overt abuse in their family. We often assume that it is only people who what we consider significant trauma who have an understandable explanation for their compulsive eating.
Feeling Emotions is a Productive Use of Time
Discovering and allowing ourselves to feel all our feelings is a way of living which results in healing compulsive eating. This means that we can achieve an end to dieting, permanent maintenance of a healthy weight, and solve nutritionally-related health problems.
Why Willpower Won’t Solve Overeating
It is impossible to will yourself to stop overeating, so stop beating yourself up when you can’t do that. You’ll stop overeating when you work through the emotional root causes.
My Emotional Control Created Overeating
To heal compulsive eating, I’ve had to open up to being emotionally messy. This is something I’m still working on. I grew up, as many of us did, in a family that valued keeping it all together, where being emotional was reserved for when someone died.
In a Cold Childhood, Food is a Friend
When we grow up in homes that feel cold or lonely, food can be a way that a child attempts to have some kind of warmth and lovely company.
Healing Food Addiction: Hopelessness and Optimism
It is normal to oscillate between moments of hopefulness and hopelessness as you are healing from overeating. We need to allow ourselves to feel however we feel about the process, meanwhile also reminding ourselves of the truth about the process.