Eating is emotional. For better or for worse, this is the truth; food speaks to our hearts. It’s the way our mothers first bonded with us when we were born. Meal time is where we meet up with our friends, family & loved ones from that moment since. It’s no wonder we sometimes turn to food to make us feel good. The trouble only starts when that’s not working.

Think about it: lunch time at school is where we met all of our friends. We bonded over who sat with whom. Dinner, for most of us, was spent with our families — catching up with one another and reconnecting after our working/studying day. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Shabbat, you name the holiday and a Google search will match it with an epic meal culture. Food is one of the most consistent, and therefore most powerful, ways we share and show love.

How many times was a painful experience soothed at meal time with our loved ones? How many times were we given our favourite food to soothe a hurt we endured?

“Breaking bread” literally means to love and/or forgive someone by physically splitting up food to share. Eating together symbolically, and quite literally, translates to friendship and camaraderie.

It seems pretty understandable how emotions can get mistakenly tied up with food. There is a healthy way and an unhealthy way to do this. Curing emotional or binge eating is unlike any other addiction. Our relationship with food has to be healed, because food can simply not be restricted the way any other substance can.

There is nothing wrong with having strong emotional ties to food. The troubles only begin when we turn to food to give us emotions that it simply cannot give.

A Heart Set on Self-Care is the Cure for Binge Eating

Last week I spoke about self-love being at the center of the cure for emotional or binge eating. This may sound obvious, but I also covered a self-loving kindness practice you can use to take steps towards this important foundation.

Emotional eating is a self-soothing mechanism not unlike any other addiction. The cure is much deeper than food and requires much more than diet advice. A binge eater also can’t simply stop eating the way someone abusing alcohol could stop drinking.

An emotional eater will have cravings, healthy cravings and unhealthy cravings. A binge eater will have desires for food, healthy desires and unhealthy desires. The path to recognizing the difference is a winding one.

The trouble with most dieting advice is that it is negative in the purest sense. “You must cut out this, cut down on that. Stay away from this, reduce that. Be disciplined. Say no. Do not, by any means, eat what you want.” There is no positive outcome that comes from a negative.

You cannot cure emotional eating with restrictions. Emotional eating is only cured when our relationship to food is healed.

A person who binges on bad food or eats terribly when they get emotional is not rational at the time. They are emotional. And if you’ve ever told a devastated child to stop crying or an irate person to calm down, you’ll realize how effective giving directions to anyone in an overly emotional state is! Not bloody likely to be very effective!

So what does work? Soothing their pain. Giving them something they need.

Only a positive approach can ever create a positive outcome. Loving yourself by your resetting into a healthy Heartset is the way to make self-care natural.

Self-care practices are necessary to replace the self-soothing mechanism emotional eating is.

The Truth is Healthy Eating is a Happiness Habit!

I think the most detrimental message within diet culture is that skinny people are starving and/or make huge sacrifices to stay thin. This is simply not true. In my research on effortless weight loss, I studied the best bodies in the world, I observed their habits, lifestyles and attitudes about life, food and exercise.

The truth is, thin people are mostly happier, more content with their life and almost always well fed!

Of course, there are outliers who suffer from ED who are also thin (many people with eating disorders are not underweight) but the overwhelming majority of the most beautiful bodies in the world belong to healthy people with good appetites!

Considering how important food is to our emotional health, this isn’t a big surprise. That’s why it’s so important to CURE emotional eating, not just MANAGE it.

[If you think you may be suffering from an eating disorder please contact a professional.]

Eating Well is a Big Part of Self-Care

I mentioned last week that the only difference between diet culture (which doesn’t aid weight loss long-term) and healthy eating habits (which absolutely is an effective strategy for sustainable weight loss) is self-love.

That’s because the difference between a negative diet mentality (can’t have this or that) and a positive healthy eating lifestyle (includes primarily wholesome foods) is the level of self-care in mind when making nutritional choices.

Positive choice = What do I want to fuel my body with?

Negative choice = I shouldn’t have this or that because it’s bad.

If being healthy isn’t enough of a motive to think positively about food, consider how thinking negatively about your eating habits affects how you feel. Many times, remorse and shame are a part of an addictive cycle.

Filling your mind with shoulds and shouldn’ts backfires against an emotional eater. The shame those thoughts evoke not only leads to more binge eating behaviours, it directly leads to weight gain.

Cure emotional eating with these 3 easy hacks.

3 Steps to Cure Emotional Eating Now

The best way to cure emotional eating is to heal the Heartset of the emotional eater. This disrupts the addiction cycle at the “emotional trigger” stage. If, at that moment the emotional eater can get their true needs met, soothe the ache they’re feeling with an appropriate salve, food does not need to be a stand-in anymore. Then and only then can true healing begin.

Step 1: RIQ-0 — Touching Base with Base Reality

Thoughts often become emotions. (Sometimes this isn’t the case and emotions create thoughts — I make specialized therapies for this.) Oftentimes, a shift in perspective is either the culprit or the curer of an emotional episode. The first District of a Wellness for Weight Loss Journey with me is dedicated entirely to healing Mindset. Developing a strategy to touch base with RIQ 0 (Base Reality) during an emotional trigger is key to being able to pull out the next tools in your toolkit.

2. Get your Needs Met

Take a moment to decipher what your needs truly are in the moment you reach for the peanut butter. This emotional needs checklist will help you in your time of … need. You can download it for free here.

Get the Emotional Needs Checklist!

3. Practice Mindful Eating

This is the most powerful part of any eating equation. You’ll get more satisfaction out of food and you can lose a heap of weight too! This is the key to figuring out the difference between unhealthy eating behaviours and true desire for food. You do not need to tell yourself a hard “no” ever again, just practice this exercise below!