Food, emotions and abuse… What is beneath it?
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Food, emotions and abuse… What is beneath it?
How we live dictates our food choices because how we live dictates how we feel. It’s a vicious cycle.
So how do we know where to start?
Firstly, begin with the food that you know deep within doesn’t support you. An example could be that it makes you feel bloated, hyped up or heavy in your body. What foods make you change from those moments of feeling settled in your body, clear in your mind and seemingly unaffected by the world? Foods that take you away from this feeling to any degree, no matter how subtle, are said to be unsupportive.
Secondly, commit to taking note when you crave or eat this food of how you were feeling in the lead up to or at the time of the craving. What feeling did you have: sadness, excitement, anger, resentment, jealousy, judgement, exhaustion, frustration and so on? For example, when we feel sad we might grab a chocolate, thinking it will make it go away. This sadness could have been from a relationship breakdown or from something that someone said. Another example is that you had a busy day at work due to a pending deadline for a project, so you missed lunch, had a lot of coffee and were crashing and looking for this chocolate to avoid feeling the exhaustion that is there.
Are you aware that eating foods to suppress feeling the emotion causes that emotion to stay in your body and build up to cause further disharmony? Did you know that if you sit and support your body and feel the emotion that is there, it will come to your awareness and leave your body rather than build up as a toxin? By not feeling what is there to be pondered on, it builds and becomes louder and louder. Have you ever wondered why one piece of chocolate used to help you and now one block is required to give you that same relief?
By sitting and feeling what is there to be felt, not only do we give ourselves the opportunity to be rid of the unwanted poisonous emotions in our physical body, we also lessen the cravings that come from that suppression and ultimately allow an opportunity for space for answers to arise for those seemingly unsolvable problems – our next steps in life – often the answers for the reasons or situations as to why we craved that food initially.
You can break the cycle by just being aware of it.
At first, it can feel horrible. However, by just choosing to feel a little of what is behind this craving and gradually going deeper, even whilst eating the food/drink initially, you will soon see that you require less of it until eventually the time will come when you will be able to catch it and understand it before the craving takes hold.
Just taking small steps and attempting to see how you feel is all that is required. Once you have experienced how much better you feel it will become a habit that you prefer over abusing your body with a reward when you are not feeling yourself.
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