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Are you using food as fuel or is there more going on in your kitchen? Eating well is an absolute necessity for our physical health (of course!), but for some of us, our relationship to food and mealtime might be a bit more complicated. For some of us, we turn to food after every bad day at work or stressful situation and our eating habits can start to get away from us. If you can relate, do not worry because you are DEFINITELY not alone, (trust me!). Emotional eating can be really difficult to address within our lives, which is why I am so glad that founder of Escape from Emotional Eating, Jessica Procini, has come back on The Stress Less Show this week to share her tips on stopping emotional eating for good.
Jessica’s story with emotional eating began very early as she found herself struggling with her personal relationship with food. While Overeaters’s Anonymous and other traditional methods didn’t resonate with her, she still found herself in need of help with overeating and healing her tortuous relationship with food. After 10 years of research and work, she has been able to completely change the way she approached food and view eating in a healthy and positive way.
“Food is a nourishing asset. It is no longer a way that I hide, escape, or destroy myself. It is the foundation on which everything is built.”
Now, she has helped countless people reconnect to a healthy relationship with food and has a couple of great tips and insights to share with us to help heal our eating habits.
What is emotional eating?
Before we can learn to let go of emotional eating, we need to first understand what it really is. Jessica defines emotional eating simply as using food for any purpose other than fuel for ourselves. A key characteristic of this definition is that Jessica deliberately does not mention any specific kinds of foods or quantities.
While we may assume that emotional eating looks like eating a lot of unhealthy foods, the reality is that emotional eating is more than just eating a bunch of cookie dough.
“Whether you're eating something healthy or not does not constitute emotional eating. It's about why you are eating.”
With this understanding of emotional eating, we can come to realize that our relationship with food may actually be more complicated than we ever thought. By removing our focus from what we are eating, we can start to notice when we are reaching for food which is the first step in healing.
“Healing emotional eating is really about coming back into integrity with your physical needs, your emotional needs, and having those needs met in a healthy way.”
Why don’t diets, meal plans, and portion control work & what can we do instead?
For many of us who have struggled with our relationship with food, we may have tried everything under the sun when it comes to controlling our emotional eating. However, as we start to view emotional eating as an issue of “why” we are eating rather than “what,” we can start to understand why these diets don’t work.
“It's basically like a weed in your garden. You can either chop it off at the soil level, which is the diets and the meal plans... Or you can do the real work and pull it out at the root”
Getting to the root causes of our emotional eating is key in truly transforming our relationship with food. According to Jessica, there are four roots of emotional eating. These roots are the emotions that trigger our emotional eating and in order to pull these roots out, we have to first identify them within ourselves and be brave enough to face these emotions.
“We have to be willing to have a different kind of conversation around what we are doing with food and really take a deeper look at why we feel compulsive. What are we trying to avoid? What are we trying to distract from?”
If you are struggling with emotional eating and are ready to find the root of your emotional eating, you can take a free quiz on Jessica’s website here to identify which root may be affecting you. That way we can let go of our emotions in a healthy way and eat for energy instead of as a way to cope.
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Have you heard? Self-love accountability has gotten a whole lot easier! We’ve launched The Virtual Stress Less Space, a brand new virtual self-care accountability group to help you relax and recharge in the comfort of your own home! Learn more here and join us for our next session on July 14th at 5:30pm ET!