118. Back To Basics - Principle 7, Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

Today in my back to basics series I’m talking about intuitive eating principle 7, Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness

Emotional eating gets a bad rap. We see it on TV and in movies all the time - have a bad break up, eat a tub of ice cream!

But what if I told you that emotional eating is fine? That’s it’s actually a good thing in some respects?

Find out in this episode how food is intrinsically linked to food, the different emotional reasons why we might eat, why it’s ok to be an emotional eater, and how you can evaluate whether it is food you need, or something else entirely.

Transcript

 A quick heads up before you start reading..... My transcriptions are automatically generated. I do not type them manually. For this reason there may be errors, incorrect words, bad spelling, bad grammar, and other things that just seem a little 'off'. You'll still be able to understand what is being said though, so please just ignore that and enjoy the episode.


[00:00:00] Hello, welcome back. We are in the middle of the intuitive eating back to basics series. In each episode, I'm going to walk you through one of the 10 principles of intuitive eating, help you understand it a little bit, give you some things to think about, give you some things to try and then you can figure out how each principle applies to you and how to apply it to your life.

Um, you might have figured out by now that this episode forms part of a series. So, feel free to keep going, feel free to stay right here, but to get the best out of it, I'd suggest you go back to the beginning of the series and watch it from the start. Um, also, before we get going, it's incredibly windy here today.

It's really windy. So, if you can hear the wind in the background, if I don't manage to get rid of it afterwards Post production. Post production, is that right? Is [00:01:00] that a thing? I don't know. If I don't manage to get rid of it anyway, I apologise. You'll just have to put up with it. Um, okay, let's go. In this episode, we are talking about principle seven, which is cope with your emotions with kindness.

We always see emotional eating as a bad thing, don't we? We see it on TV as being binges, uncontrollable eating, people eating their way through an entire tub of ice cream. Yeah. Think about Paul Chandler in Friends. Remember his breakup? And at the end of the episode. They get the ice cream. And that is his acceptance of his emotional state, but emotional eating is not always a bad thing.

And that's why in principle seven, cope with your emotions with kindness. You learn that it is okay. It's absolutely okay to eat to soothe your emotions. Let me start by saying that this is part [00:02:00] of a module that's in the Eat From Within membership. So I'm going to touch on this very lightly here today, but if you really like it and you want to dig in a little bit deeper, then go get yourself in the membership because I go really deep there with this stuff.

It's really interesting. So I'm just going to touch on it a little bit here. Come and join me in the membership if you want to get stuck into it a bit more because there's a wealth of information on this stuff in there. The link for that's in the show notes. From now on, I would like you to try and think of emotional eating slightly differently.

When we are feeling super emotional, we do what we think is the stereotypical emotional eating, right? We have a big binge, we lose control, we plow our way through anything and everything that we can get our hands on, and then we beat ourselves up and we feel guilty, right? Then the cycle starts again [00:03:00] because then you're going to eat, because you're unhappy, because you feel guilty, round and round it goes.

But what about the side of the food that is nice, that is positive, that is happy? How much do you like to bake or cook for example? Do you enjoy it? Maybe you really like to bake and you like to cook something and you like to give that to other people. You like to bake a cake for a friend or a family member for example, for their birthday maybe.

Or maybe you really enjoy cooking and serving up a really nice, hearty, homemade meal for your family. That's happiness in food. That's enjoyment in food. And it's the same with things like birthdays and christenings and weddings. Food plays a massive part in those. But you don't see it as emotional eating because you're at an event.

You're [00:04:00] happy. Emotional eating is always seen as a negative thing. And it's also not as extreme as it's portrayed on the TV most of the time. There's loads of reasons why we eat emotionally, but it does not mean that we have to go on this big, massive binge all the time. Sometimes, we just want to sit and have some ice cream.

Sometimes, we just want a few biscuits. We're just feeling a bit rubbish. We fancy it. It's gonna help us. It's gonna make us feel better. Sometimes you want something stodgy because you want the comfort of it. There's lots of different reasons and they might all be linked to emotions, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be this big thing that we expect it to be when we think about emotional eating.

There's loads of different types of emotional eating as well. We might eat for comfort. We might eat to cure boredom. God, how many times have you done that? Right? [00:05:00] I'm bored. I'm gonna have something to eat. I'm bored, I'm gonna go get some food. Even if you don't realise it, when you're bored, sometimes it's a habit, you just go and you get some food.

We eat for pleasure, too. We eat to punish ourselves. We eat as a distraction, as procrastination. How many times have you said, I'll just do this. And then, I'll just go and get something to eat. And then, I'll just have a couple of biscuits. And then, it's a distraction technique. Equally, what about the reward of it?

I'll do this and then I can treat myself to a slice of cake. Sometimes we eat to fit in too, because we want to connect with people. Um, other people are going for food maybe, so you do too. Other people are eating a buffet. Bye! So you do too. [00:06:00] Other people around you are having cake, so you do too. You're eating because you have an emotional drive to fit in.

What about tiredness as well? How often have you felt that you need carbs when you're tired? Oh, there's the wind. Can you hear it or not? I don't know. Um, how often have you felt like you need carbs when you're tired? Well you do, because that's your body trying to get some energy in. And it's Satisfying something that is emotional.

Food has real emotional links all through our life. It's not just about the fuel. Um, from birth, we feed a crying baby, don't we? The baby cries. It has an emotion that you can hear and you can see and you feed them. Uh, a small child when they're young, if they fall over, for example, [00:07:00] they've hurt themselves and you say.

Should we make, get some sweets and make it, make it better? Maybe food has a real memory link to some places. For me, I really love chips on the beach. I love going on holiday and having chips on the beach. There are foods that a family member cooked when I was growing up, and now when I see it or I taste it, it brings back those memories.

These are good memories. It's quite normal that if you're feeling a bit emotionally charged in one way or another as well, that you might turn to food. And it's really important to realise that it's not always a negative thing. It is good to recognise what triggers these eating habits. There might be things that set you off.

There might be things that drive you to go for food. You might be annoyed. You might be hassled. You might be busy. You [00:08:00] might be worried about something. You might be stressed. How do these things feel to you? Do any of those trigger you to eat? Equally, you might be happy and that triggers you. Maybe part of your triggers, part of the things that make you tick, is happiness around food.

Maybe it's learnt habits. Something happens, you feel a certain way, and you eat. And that's the way it's happened for you for such a long time, that now it's a habit. It's good to recognise these things for yourself, because then you can work with them, you can use them, you know why it's happening. But also, here comes the surprise of the day.

Dieting makes us emotionally eat. Who knew? Right? Who knew? A study. Of 35, 000 people showed that dieters engage in more emotional eating [00:09:00] than non dieters. Shock horror, right? Dieting messes with our mental health. It messes with our physical health. It's no wonder that when we're dieting, our responses to emotions are food related.

So it's not your fault. If you've got a history of dieting, If you've got a history of weight cycling, you are more naturally likely to engage in emotional eating. And so to have that understanding, you can have some compassion for yourself, right? Dieting drives an emotional response, not just a physical one.

And these are going to be things that maybe you didn't even realize before you started intuitive eating. And you start to understand these principles a little differently when you realize That you will have an emotional response to. Self care and kindness is going to go a long way to helping you with your emotions.

Okay. [00:10:00] I have to include here that there might be genuinely things in life that you're missing. And this is what you're trying to make up for when you're emotionally eating. There could be things like you haven't had enough rest. If you are tired, Then you might be driven to eat more because your body and your mind are instructing you to eat and to find the energy to keep functioning.

If you're missing out on sleep, if you're missing out on downtime and just rest and relaxation, it might be that you're eating more emotionally because you're trying to fill the gap there. Does that make sense? Other things, like sensual pleasure, it's a really natural thing for us human beings to want the touch of other people.

Sensual pleasure doesn't necessarily have to mean from a partner, intimately. It can just be the touch on the shoulder from a friend. Or A [00:11:00] hug from someone, you know, the need for pleasure is, is a whole body thing. We also need to pleasure the other senses. Do you need nicer lighting? Do you need some gentle music?

Do you need the comfort of a cozy sofa and a warm blanket? You know, we also need to express our feelings and be heard. Do you feel like you're being heard? Do you feel like you have the ability to express what you're feeling and what you're thinking? Because if you can't, and you've got it all bottled up, then it's quite easy to eat emotionally, to try and soothe that, and to try and patch it up, essentially.

So, maybe you need someone to listen to you, you know? To take some time to just hear what you're saying. Maybe you need some stimulation. Maybe you need [00:12:00] something creative or intellectual in your life. Again, as human beings, we need to be stimulated. We need our minds to be kept active. Maybe you want to do something artistic, like painting or dancing.

Maybe it's something more intellectual for you. Reading books, studying, watching a documentary, that sort of thing. Learning something. We all need this mental stimulation. No matter what form it comes in, what your preference is. And if you're not getting that, it can be really easy to just turn to food.

Comfort, warmth, nurturing, all of these things are physical needs. If we don't get them, the mind and the body tries to find them. And maybe, then, food becomes this temporary patch. So, you can ask yourself, in times where you think you're emotionally eating, Is something missing for you? [00:13:00] What is going to satisfy your soul right now?

So principle seven, cope with your emotions with kindness, is about giving yourself that compassion. It's about being able to realize that it's happening, try and understand why. And then you can take steps to move from that, prepare for it. Maybe when it happens again, you'll understand it. Maybe it won't trigger you so much then in future.

And this isn't saying that emotional eating is bad. It's not saying that you shouldn't do it, and you should always find something else. That you should always find another reason for it, or another solution. But if you do recognise that, That you're eating out of something like tiredness or boredom, you're trying to avoid something or reward yourself for something, then are there other ways you can do that?

That might help you ease that relationship with food a little bit. What is really key [00:14:00] here is total acceptance of eating whatever you're eating. So remember, as an intuitive eater, you have unconditional permission to eat. Just know that it's okay to eat emotionally. It's okay to eat whatever food you've chosen in that moment.

It is okay if you're eating and you're not hungry. Don't try and make up for it later to conserve calories, to make up for calories that you've eaten, to exercise to earn back the calories, that sort of thing. There's no need to do that. Just give yourself acceptance. Say it's happened. It's okay. I understand why.

And give yourself that compassion and then just move on. So has that given you a bit of an insight into emotional eating and what it means and what it might be coming from? I hope so. Um, remember we're [00:15:00] here to be chilled out about food, more relaxed about food. So if you're an emotional eater, you're an emotional eater, right?

Sometimes that is also just the way it is. If you would like me to help you to figure out what kind of an eater you are, what kind of emotional eater you are, then let me help you. I would love to. I'd love to give you some tips to help you break the cycles. Um, I'd love to have a discovery call with you.

It's just a free 30 minute session. We can talk about your relationship with food. We can talk about how you feel around food. I can give you some tips, um, get you going straight away. And then we can look at some options for what might help you going forward. The link is in the show notes.