How has your relationship with emotional eating shifted?

You might have noticed that the last month I've been talking a lot about emotional eating. That was the March theme in the Intuitive Eating for Life Community. Here, I'd like to sum up some key points about emotional eating and give you contemplations you can come back to again and again:

1. Repeat after me: there is nothing wrong with having emotions about food. Our cultures, celebrations, associations, and special experiences are what make our relationship with food uniquely ours. Clarify for yourself what you would like the quality of your emotional relationship with food to be. For example, it might be one in which the emotional connection with food provides comfort and guides you to take care of yourself, without feeling like you over rely on food to cope with strong emotions.

2. Extreme hunger feels emotional! Try to avoid the danger zone of extreme or primal hunger, which can feel emotionally overwhelming and trigger overeating or a binge. Feeding yourself regularly and satisfyingly will help you navigate all of your ups and downs as well as you can. Especially during times of increased stress or difficult emotions, prioritize eating regularly to support yourself, perhaps even downshifting into a more structured approach to meals and snacks.

3. Do what you can to stabilize your nervous system so you have the best chance of meeting emotions directly rather than spinning out, catastrophizing, or using food in a way that increases your suffering (but do remember that emotional eating sometimes is OK!). Meditating, getting enough rest and restorative sleep, speaking with a therapist or trusted person, and connecting with others are some of the ways we support ourselves to meet our emotions directly.

4. Acknowledge that you have a natural preference for ease and pleasure and a natural distaste for struggle and pain. This is fine and normal and part of what has helped us survive as a species. It's only when we become intolerant of discomfort that things really get hairy.

5. Watch the life cycle of emotions. As with all things, emotions arise, level off, and eventually dissolve. If you can notice when an emotion emerges, could you stay with it through its life cycle, noticing how it shifts and changes in subtle ways over time?

6. Practice staying with the dissolving quality of pleasurable experiences. This will empower you to be fully present during positive experiences - rather than fearing their end - and will help you work with the nature of reality when they naturally come to an end - rather than chasing after them or trying to amp them up.

7. Practice staying with the arising of discomfort. This could be anything from waiting in line at the store, waiting on the phone for customer service, dealing with an annoying detail of maintaining a home, getting caught in the rain...whatever. Notice as discomfort arises, notice the urge to bolt, and see if you might stay with it even a moment longer than usual.

8. Celebrate awareness. We get very focused on what "success" means with emotional eating and this makes sense. But emphasizing the "win" of not eating emotionally when dealing with strong emotions has some strong roots in diet culture. Rather than celebrating "not eating," could you celebrate your ability to notice and work precisely and directly with what's in front of you? Always be challenging diet culture - it's a sneaky, slipper MOFO!