One of the biggest challenges I had in healing my relationship with food was emotional eating. The unstructured approach and freedom that comes with intuitive eating can be overwhelming, especially for someone who is stuck in the habit of emotional eating. Here’s how to heal emotional eating while learning intuitive eating.
Common challenges with intuitive eating as an emotional eater
When I first started intuitive eating, I didn’t think it was going to work for me because I felt like I was overeating too much. And I didn’t realize how many of those times were actually for emotional eating. I just thought I had cravings at night because I didn’t have the self-control to not eat the foods that tempted me.
But through intuitive eating, I gained awareness of how I was actually overeating most often when I felt stressed, bored, tired, and anything.
Then came my next challenge. How could I honor my cravings without being uncomfortable? It’s hard in the beginning to understand the nuances of honoring hunger and fullness cues plus taste cravings.
This is a common challenge I help people work through – learning how to balance saying no to taste cravings when it feels like the most aligned choice. When you’ve been dieting for years, saying no to food can feel like a diet rule and restriction. So it’s learning to disconnect those ideas. It’s learning that even though you have unconditional permission to eat anything at any time doesn’t mean you’ll always truly want to eat.
If you’re new to this, you may read that and think “of course I’ll always want to eat if I don’t control myself” and I get why you think that, I used to think the same.
But as you heal your relationship with food, you create more peace around food and with your body. As that happens, it’s easy to honor your body’s and your cravings for food change to become more balanced.
How to heal emotional eating while practicing intuitive eating
The first step to healing emotional eating while becoming an intuitive eater is deeply understanding emotional eating. You want to look at both why you emotionally eat and how it helps you because yes it does do something to help you.
When we feel emotions, we feel them somewhere in our body – like feeling butterflies in your stomach when you feel nervous. When you eat it can dull those sensations to make them feel more comfortable.
Emotional eating provides the benefit of making you feel better, even if it’s just for a short period of time. Understanding that benefit can help you stop viewing emotionally eating as a bad thing to do. Yes, emotional eating may not be the most effective method and may not be the one you want to do because it can lead to disadvantages like feeling bloated and uncomfortably full.
I find it most helpful to look at emotional eating as a tool in your emotional wellness toolkit instead of something you need to avoid or shouldn’t do. When you resist emotional eating, it can make it harder not to emotionally eat. But when you give yourself permission to emotionally eat, you can more logically assess if it’s the right tool to help you feel better overall.
Intuitive eating isn’t just saying yes to eating the moment you think about eating something. It’s assessing what would feel best for your body and your mind.
Tips for intuitive eating and emotional eating
- It takes time and practice. You won’t immediately know exactly what you do and that’s ok.
- Embrace failing and doing it wrong. At first, I brought my perfectionist mindset into intuitive eating, so while there really isn’t a way to do intuitive eating wrong since it’s just learning what works best for you, still there will be times when it doesn’t go as you planned and that’s ok.
- Practice giving yourself grace and compassion when you do emotionally eat. Judging yourself for emotionally eating won’t do anything to help and it stops you from learning from it.
- Remember emotional eating isn’t a problem. It’s just an option and you get to decide if it’s the best one for you.
- Give yourself permission to emotionally eat. Resisting emotional eating can distract you from taking care of what you actually need and could make it more likely you’ll emotionally eat. And remember permission to do something doesn’t mean you’ll always choose to do it.