I don’t think I have a very controversial take on how to cure emotional eating. If you get your emotional needs met, voila. Emotional eating ends. Where my strategy to cure emotional eating gets a bit confrontational is that I think emotional eating actually comes from the same place as eating very well.
There is really only one thing that differentiates toxic dieting and binge eating from healthy eating patterns, and it’s our Heartset level of self-love.
A Heart Set on Self-Love is the Cure for Binge Eating
Sounds awesome, right? Makes sense. Self-love. Hurrah. My work here is done.
Just joking. We are not even close to being done yet.
One of the things I hate about people who give advice for a living is it often ends here: at this impossible place that starts with “you just have to…” and ends with “….[insert some wonderful sounding but ultimately incredibly difficult thing to make a plan for like ‘love yourself’]”.
Doesn’t that just make you want to scream “BUT THAT’S WHY I’M HERE READING THIS BLOG POST! I know I need to love myself, duh! I wanted you to tell me HOW!”
So, I’m going to tell you how. Tap into your Heartset. It’s easy.
Why Emotional Eating Advice is so Frustrating
In my work with my students, I use this set of 4 Districts to explain how everyone’s character is formed:
- Mindset (Mental)
- Heartset (Emotional)
- Soulset (Energetic) &
- BODiset (Physical)
When we get advice or “how-to”s about something concerning Heartset (like relationships — with food or otherwise), or Soulset (like how to feel confident or find purpose), or even BODiset (like how to lose weight or manage stress) it scratches the itch on the Mindset level then falls short of HOW to actually address the issue on the level it truly originates on.
That’s why it’s so frustrating to get advice about emotional eating, weight loss or confidence!
Separately, each District means only a fraction of the puzzle that is you. But together… they form exponential magic.
What is Heartset?
You all know Mindset. Oxford Dictionary defines it as:
Mindset, simply put, is the kind of programming your thoughts routinely run through.
Heartset is the same. But instead of thoughts, it runs with your emotions.
You can see Oxford’s “mindset” examples above are political and cultural. One is influenced by an ideology (conservatism), the other by an experience (having computers growing up).
This is a crucial point: Mindset, like the Heartset and other 2 sets, is set BY something. It’s programmed.
Heartset is how you habitually FEEL. Feelings, like thoughts, happen according to a pattern. And as Oxford notes, these patterns are “difficult to change“.
If you find yourself or someone you care about struggling with disordered eating habits, the cure is in the pattern behind the behaviour, not the food.
How to Check Someone’s Heartset
Heartset is displayed by the way someone reacts to emotional stimulus. Just as you could ask someone a question to get clues as to their mindset — like what they think about technology or the current state of the economy — you can also note someone’s Heartset by their emotional reactions.
Soulset is where all the “manifestation” gurus get their gusto and BODiset is closely linked to neural programming, hormone secretion and nervous system responses (biology).
Emotional eating is the result of a certain kind of Heartset… which I think is really beautiful.
Emotional eaters are the types who are really full of love. They need a lot of nurturance. Somewhere along the line, they learned to give food — a wonderful giver of sustenance, the sweetness we nurture our bodies with — or meals — the broadest bonding act we share with others in daily life — an undue amount of responsibility.
The way this emotional eating lesson was learned, the place this pattern was programmed into, was Heartset. The way to undo it, the place to reprogram a healthier pattern, is also right there in the Heartset of emotional wellness.
The #1 Rule of a Healthy Heartset
I love how simple these incredibly complicated, seemingly impossible tasks — like being confident, loving yourself, or losing weight — become once my students recognize what District in the sets their issue belongs to!
I make a whole portfolio of therapies that are truly scientific, totally unique, and really effective to re-pattern Mindset, Heartset, Soulset and BODiset. In a single sentence though, what a healthy Heartset is programmed with is self-love.
Self-love is the channel to find what your unique acts of self-care ARE.
This is another reason simply ‘getting some advice’ is really subpar when you’re trying to work through something like emotional eating: because you’re a unique individual with …. drum roll please … your own needs.
The #1 rule of a Healthy Heartset is: getting your needs met.
I’m going to talk more about needs in Part 2 of Curing Emotional Eating, but for now go and practice the Tapping exercise I made for you. If it sounds weird to you, you’re in good company, I was astounded when I saw the statistics on how effective EFT Tapping is! It is a clinical practice.
Heartset is one District that doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to be effective. And EFT, when done properly and part of a larger plan of Heartset action, is!
