Why do you eat emotionally? What is happening when you use food as a coping strategy or tool to get an internal need met?
Quite often you develop strong emotional connections with food that are related to love, acceptance and comfort. These connections are made early in your lives and often stay with you unconsciously throughout your entire lifetimes.
You see food as your grandmother or mother’s love and kindness, or as the friend you never had and needed or even as a way to “stuff” painful emotions like anger, loneliness, or grief. You develop a relationship with food that is very personal and very real to you.
To stop emotional eating, you need to understand your own personal relationship to food. Insight is not going to change your desire to quench a very powerful emotional response in most cases.
You can feel the truth of this every time you go to eat the food, when you aren’t hungry. You know, you aren’t hungry and also you know that it is a habit that has developed because you feel overwhelmed and stressed.
Here are some good questions you can ask to begin to heal or change this relationship with food:
1. What does food represent to you?
2. Where did you first learn that, or feel that food represented that to you?
EFT- Emotional Freedom Technique is a tool to begin to address the feelings and thoughts about food and what it represents. You do this through simple tapping with your fingertips on traditional acupuncture meridian end points on the face and body as we feel or say the emotions or thought we are experiencing.
Once you are on target with how you feel, tapping can be relatively simple and fast in releasing emotions.
In other words, if food represented love to you, you might then come to realise after tapping that food can never give you the love that you desire and that only you or others can. Tapping addresses a deeper subconscious level to our thoughts; beliefs and emotions. The shifts in perception are not surface but seem to be permanent and lasting.
Don’t you feel it a new way to deal with your old patterns with food and stop emotional eating for good.
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