Emotional Eating
Do you use food to soothe your emotions? When you’re stressed do you find yourself thinking of food or turning to food for comfort? Do your emotions rule what and how much you eat?
For many people food becomes their coping strategy when they experience strong emotions (believe it or not, these can be positive or negative emotions). And probably even more surprising- emotional eating isn’t actually a bad thing. We all eat with emotions and emotional eating can be a very powerful experience related to the connections you have with food- family, friends, life events, etc.
Emotional eating becomes a problem when it is the only tool or coping strategy that you have to help you manage emotions. When food becomes your only coping source it can lead to feeling out of control, miserable and hopeless.
Sadly, when you feel this way the typical recommendation to “fix” the problem is dieting. Unfortunately, dieting is really part of the problem. Dieting or restriction will make emotional eating worse and lead to feeling like a chronic failure (aka increased guilt and shame around food).
To help you learn how to eat confidently with emotions and develop alternative coping skills for handling emotions we will:
- Review your current eating to discover any patterns that interfere with your ability to feel in charge of your eating.
- Identify emotions and triggers that set you up to use food in a way that feels out of control
- Explore emotions and how to experience them in a way that’s supportive to you.
- Develop curiosity about your eating patterns and why you do what you do.
- Shift from blaming and judgment to self compassion (a key component to finding food freedom).
