I spent years struggling with my weight. During these years, I
learned about healthy eating, and even with eating all organic foods and
finding the right nutrition plan for me, as well as the right exercise
for me, I still struggled with my weight.
Then I discovered the underlying cause of weight issues and the
powerful secrets to permanent weight loss, and my weight struggles
ended! Here are the secrets I learned that can help you make peace with
emotional eating, and end your weight loss struggles.
1. Acknowledge your feelings.
The primary cause of emotional eating is that food is being used to
avoid core painful feelings — feelings that we could not manage when we
were little, and that most adults have never learned to lovingly manage.
It took me years to fully understand what these specific feelings
are, why they’re so difficult to feel, and what we need to do to be able
to feel them rather than avoid them with food and other addictions.
The main feelings we use food to avoid are:
We feel loneliness when we want to connect with someone and either no
one is there, or the person or people who are there are not available
for connection.
Most of us experienced much loneliness as children. Since this
feeling was way too big for us, we learned to avoid it in different
ways, and food may have been one of the ways.
Heartbreak
Most of us had our hearts broken over and over as children. It’s
heartbreaking when we aren’t heard or seen, or are controlled, rejected
or abused. We learned various ways of avoiding this very painful
feeling, including eating for comfort.
Grief
If we’ve experienced a major loss and were not held in love over the
loss, we needed to find ways of avoiding this overwhelming feeling.
Helplessness over others and events
This is one of the hardest of feelings to feel. Many of us will do
almost anything to avoid accepting and feeling helpless over others and
outcomes. This avoidance may go all the way back to infancy: if we cried
and no one came to feed us and tend to us, we could have died, so the
feeling of helplessness over others may become connected with an actual
fear of dying.
2. Don’t abandon yourself.
As children, we may have learned four major ways to avoid these
painful feelings, which we had to do to survive. But as adults, these
survival strategies lead to self-abandonment, and cause other painful
feelings — such as anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, loneliness,
emptiness and anger. Just as actual children feel alone, rejected and
abandoned, as well as anxious, depressed, shamed or angry if you avoid
tending to their feelings with compassion, your inner child — your
feeling self — feels the same way.
The four ways you may be abandoning yourself are:
You stay in your mind rather than in your body.
When you stay focused in your mind, you become disconnected from the
feelings in your body. This is a form of dissociation, a survival
mechanism to avoid your feelings, and always results in feeling alone
and rejected inside.
You judge yourself.
You might have learned to judge yourself as a way to try to have
control over getting yourself to do things “right” so you could gain
others’ approval. Again, just as actual children feel anxious and
rejected when you judge them, your inner child will feel anxious and
abandoned when you reject yourself with self-judgments.
You turn to substance and process addictions.
Here’s where food comes in. Food is one addictive way of numbing your
feelings, which you might do when you don’t know how to lovingly manage
your painful feelings.
You make others responsible for your feelings.
Just as an actual child will feel rejected and abandoned if you give
him or her away, so your inner child feels alone, rejected and abandoned
when you give him or her to others in order to feel loved, worthy and
safe. To heal from addictive eating, you need to learn to lovingly manage
your painful feelings and make yourself feel loved, worthy and safe.
3. Love yourself.
When you learn to love yourself, you’ll no longer need to emotionally
eat to avoid your painful feelings. When you learn to hold your heart
with deep gentleness and compassion, rather than avoid your feelings
with the above ways of abandoning yourself, you will find yourself
losing weight and permanently keeping it off. When you learn to fill
your inner emptiness and loneliness with love from a spiritual source,
you will no longer need to fill up with food.
Source: Positive Med
