“Sometimes I just can’t shovel the food in fast enough.”“When I get home from a stressful day at work, I deserve to reward myself.” “I just love the taste of food so much.” “When I’m indulging, I don’t even care in that moment that I had promised myself I wouldn’t do that again.”
Have you ever had any of these conversations with yourself? I know I have. So much of my own research this past year has been to look at the why and the how behind eating, not necessarily the ‘what’! I attended a webinar the other day that looked at the underlying issues with our nutrition. It covered the evolutionary purpose and function of our emotions and explained why so many of us fear our feelings due to what we learned about them in childhood.
The speaker, Karen Koenig described why certain emotions are difficult for dysregulated eaters (over-eating, under-eating, binge-eating) and how they may make us turn to food.
I wish I could share the whole webinar, it was THAT insightful, but I will highlight a few main thoughts:
Emotions are a conscious experience of an internal reaction to an external event. It is a sensation with a name pinned on it. For example, our bodily sensation may be butterflies in our stomach, but the emotion is anxiety. These emotions are neither good nor bad, but rather they are like colours or musical notes, they just are.
The function of an emotion is to get us to move toward pleasure or away from pain. Emotions will arise to increase our chance of survival and decrease our chance of extinction. The problem with this is that our fear emotions are highly arousing and almost always over-generalizing. Feeling intense emotions like fear, shame, and anger are often uncomfortable and so we take the posture that emotions like that are bad and therefore we ignore them or try to get rid of them instead of non-judgmentally acknowledging them. 
When we are young, we are at their mercy. If we did not have a care giver who modeled self soothing and validation for us, then as adults we tend to develop secondary emotions.
- I feel ashamed when I’m proud of an accomplishment because pride was unspiritual in my home.
- I feel guilty when I’m joyful because others are suffering.
When it comes to emotions and food, we may even eat mindlessly to distract ourselves from this emotional discomfort. We unconsciously rationalize our emotions and deny them any space.
What if you saw your emotions like information to what is going on inside? Think about receiving a text or an email and how when you receive it, you acquire information from the sender.
Here are Karen’s tips on dealing with unpleasant emotions:
- Acknowledge the emotion and give it a label. Is it anxiety, sadness, or shame?
- Accept it and be curious about its presence right then.
- Give self-compassion and remind yourself that you can handle whatever you are feeling.
- Explore your feelings. Know when to hold on to them and when to let them go.
- When its appropriate share your feelings with a trusted friend.
- Tell yourself how you want to feel as opposed to how you do feel in that moment.
Tomorrow we are going to continue this conversation as we look at identifying our triggers and working with our intense reactions that may be driving us to food (or any other coping strategy) to soothe.
What has been your relationship with food? Has it been a fight? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments below.
