February 15, 2023
Welcome to The Balanced Dietitian Podcast! I hope you are doing so wonderful. It is already mid-February. Last week I got to host another workshop on emotional eating. It was so good. I love to be able to teach about emotional eating because it really bridges my love of psychology and nutrition together. I feel this is a topic that has a lot of shame and guilt around it.
One of the themes that came out a lot at the workshop that I wanted to bring on this podcast is the idea that if I know that emotional eating is not helping me why do I keep doing it? A lot of hopelessness starts to set in when we feel out of control and can not stop.
[03:38] If we know something doesn’t work for us, why do we continue doing it?
If we know logically that something doesn’t work for us, why do we continue to do it? The answer is simple but not easy. The answer is that the reason we continue to do that thing is that it’s serving us in some way. A lot of the behaviors that we have are driven by either emotions or thoughts we have or needs that we’re trying to meet. We often feel shame and guilt when we know something isn’t working but we keep doing it. Instead, we’re gonna want to look at it with a curious eye. Why is it that this is still showing up for me? How is this still serving me?
[04:51] Food and emotions are deeply linked
From a very young age, we start associating our emotions and coping with those emotions with food and using food in different ways. We start associating food with emotions, which means that the coping mechanism is potent, powerful, effective, and it’s helpful. It works. That’s why we use it. There’s no shame in knowing that emotional eating has been serving me. We can also realize we are so glad that food was there for me during those times and now that I’m ready to learn to deal differently.
[07:28] Emotional eating is a often way we cope
Our relationship to food and emotional eating is that it has been such a significant coping strategy that it can be really hard to let go of it and there’s no shame in that. As humans, we do things that are effective for us but now we want to find other ways to cope.
[09:32] Making peace with the fact that food has been our coping
The first piece that we want to do here is make peace with the fact that food has been our coping and now we’re ready to do something different. I really believe that that part is really important. The shaming guilt that we can have around food can often stop us from doing the work because we’re just piling on so many emotions on top and it gets very overwhelming. Then when we get overwhelmed we go back to our old coping skills. We can just start to see and understand that it’s no longer something we want to do.
[12:02] The most impactful work you can do
The most impactful work that you can ever do is healing our relationship with food and body. Once we have a good relationship with food and body, we get to experience this world differently. It might be through family, friends, your work through your purpose, or travel. That’s why we’re here. We’re here to experience our life.
If you are looking for more support from our team - We are happy to help
Every month, The Balanced Practice offers a low-cost workshop on topics related to eating disorders/disordered eating. Check out the next one coming up!
We offer different services in order to meet you exactly where you are at and provide you with the most appropriate level of support to reach your goals (no one-size-fits-all here). Our team works closely together and with other healthcare professionals to make sure we can provide you with the very best care.
Here at The Balanced Practice, we get it. We believe that you deserve more joy, more connection, and more fulfillment. After all, life is meant to be experienced fully (and not spent feeling stuck in our own heads). And we want to help, our team is available during the day and into the evening!
