| weight loss and emotive eating |
 |
|
EMOTIONS AND EATING by Dr. Sherri Edelman ARE YOU IN YOUR OWN WAY? Eating is a metaphor for the way we live and love. Excessive fantasizing, creating drama, the need to be in control, and wanting what is forbidden are some of the behaviors that block us from finding joy in food or relationships. Guidelines that enable us to break free from compulsive behavior—learning to stay in the present, beginning to value ourselves NOW, giving the hungry child within us a voice, understanding our physical and emotional hungers, and teaching ourselves to receive pleasure—enable us to be intimate with ourselves and others. • Diets don’t work because FOOD & WEIGHT are the SYMPTOMS, not the problems! The focus on weight provides a convenient and culturally reinforced distraction from the reasons why so many people use food when they are not hungry! • Some of the reasons we experience failure have more to do with—neglect, lack of trust, lack of love, unexpressed rage, grief, protection from getting hurt… • People abuse themselves with food because they haven’t learned deeply that they deserve better, and have not learned and implemented the skills and strategies that are necessary to remove the interference to living the truth. It is important to now take responsibility for changing these archaic dysfunction and destructive patterns of reacting and perceiving ourselves. Because our patterns of eating were formed by early perceptions of loving, it is necessary to understand and work with beliefs around both food and love to feel satisfied with our relationship to either. EATING AS A COMPULSION Compulsion is despair on the emotional level…the feeling that there is no one home. We become compulsive to create what we believe is not there. All we ever wanted, or still want, is love. • We didn’t want to become compulsive…we did it to survive, to keep from going crazy. • Food becomes love—eating is a way of being loved. It is available when noone else is…it is always there…it tastes good…is warm when we are cold and cold when we are hot. It becomes the closest thing we know of love. • This happens not because we are ignorant, but if we’ve never been “loved well”, we don’t know what love really feels like, and we haven’t learned to love ourselves well. We need to learn that now. Compulsive behavior, at its most fundamental, is a lack of self-love; it is an expression of a belief that we are not good enough. When we are children, we have no resources, no power to make choices about our life situation. We are completely dependent on our caregivers for food, shelter and love. If we experience the pain as too uncomfortable and we have no power to change it or leave, we shut it off. We then switch our pain to something we can control: a compulsion. Food is just one of many possibilities. (Others are sex, television, work, alcohol, drugs, shopping, etc.) Fortunately, as adults, we have free choice to revisit the decisions we made long ago before we had a real choice—about our self-worth, our capacity to love, and our willingness to be loved, for it is from these decisions that many of our old beliefs about compulsion and love took hold. Long ago we had no choice—now we do! When food and love get mixed up with each other—we stop showing the places that hurt or need comfort. We stop expecting our needs will be met (sometimes we don’t even know what our real needs are!) and we begin to rely on ourselves and only ourselves to provide sustenance, comfort, and pleasure. So we begin to eat. And eat…but not to fuel and nourish our bodies. GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY Set a goal to be a healthy, fit body that is guided by a health fit mind. To gain confidence on this path, you need to listen to yourself, both thoughts and feelings. Build a “Self” based on Esteem, Kindness, Patience and Forgiveness. Break free from Mindless Eating…. it asks you to stop being a victim, gives you choice, self-responsibility. Go against a culture that encourages us to define our self-worth as a comparison, against externals—what we look like, what we weigh, how much we possess. Mend the shattered, fractured self, hiding inside the compulsion. Seek help from professionals that can partner with you on this very important journey. Use the strong language of action: I agree to I pledge to I am prepared to I intend to I am ready to I vow to I promise to I will Vow today to not stand in your own way. What if I can’t seem to make progress on my own with changing old patterns? |
|
 |
