We repeat what we don’t repair

Food emotional eating

“We repeat what we don’t repair.”

 Christine Langley-Obaugh

And along the same lines,

“That which is not understood and completed will repeat itself again and again till it is; there is no escape from this, do what you will.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti

I believe there is so much wisdom in these quotes. There is certainly truth in that we tend to repeat, usually unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously whatever has not been dealt with, more fully understood, or processed, or made a space for. We can use different kinds of language to understand this idea. Regardless of the specific language we use, it is clear this notion has significant implications for emotional eating.

By this I mean, we experience something that triggers a feeling that we kind of know, be it loneliness, upset, frustration, boredom, sadness, or any other. And when we get into that “emotional space,” we tend to eat. We tend to turn to food. Food is there, food is available. Food looks good, smells good. It may even remind us of happy times in our childhood. Times that we spent with others, times in which we were taken care of, times in which food smoothed a rough patch, be it tiny or big.

There are so many associations we have with food. We can have both positive and negative associates to food. For example, I might remember in my heart how food has been a source of comfort. And/ or I may associate food to painful feelings like shame and guilt. Shame and guilt are extremely common feelings that we experience kind of in phase 3 of the emotional eating cycle, right?

It looks kind of like this:

Phase 1: There is an emotional trigger—I have linked in my brain, heart, and body that when I feel ‘sad’ (as an example), a home-made hot cocoa with biscuits help, takes my mind off of it for a bit.

Phase 2: Now I am eating my biscuits, tasting the perfect hot cocoa and I sense the feeling good inside happening, the weight of the sadness for a brief time is lifted, the food tastes good, as I am enjoying the food I don’t have to think or do anything else or sit with the sadness anymore, food provides a welcome break.

Phase 3: It is when we start feeling the adverse emotional consequences of our emotional eating—shame, guilt, rumination, discouragement, disappointment in ourselves, a sense of defeat, we even beat ourselves up for having behaved this way.

So we know there are no shortage of negative consequences about emotional eating—even more broadly we could speak about body image concerns, social isolation as we need or want to be alone to eat, financial worries if we are spending significant extra money on food, and on and on it goes.

The long-term burden we experience for the short-term relief we crave is REAL

Woman with emotional eating

So, what is to be done?

This is the point in which I love sharing my tremendous hope and confidence that this is a behavior that we can work on so that it does not exert the powerful influence it may have on us today. The first step is always to deepen our awareness of why..

Why is it that we are doing what we are doing?—because we will repeat what we don’t repair. By “repair “here I mean what we haven’t made the time to explore, process, and better understand.


So you may be thinking,

what does that really mean?

what do you mean “explore and process”?

Let’s unpack this so that it becomes clearer and something you may consider adopting in your own journey. Exploring and making space for the emotions that trigger your emotional eating means that the next time you are triggered to eat and basically find yourself automatically walking into the kitchen and opening the fridge or calling for take out, you can apply this principle of looking at your thoughts instead of from your thoughts—

But wait, what does this mean?

The gist of looking at our thoughts instead of from our thoughts is this: to take a moment to look within, at what we are feeling or thinking in that very moment instead of to look at the world (ourselves, others, the world) planted in the conviction that what we are thinking is true. In other words, we want to slow this process way down so that we can reflect on what is going on inside ourselves before we run to put food in our mouths to sooth a painful or overwhelming emotion.

And,

this is the invitation— that the next time you find yourself having a craving or the urge to eat, just for a moment pause and be curious, am I really hungry? and, what am I thinking or feeling right now that is prompting me to eat? It helps if we can make a mental note of the how the cycle of emotional eating is unfolding for us—for example:

“I had an argument with my partner (kid, boss, best friend), I felt alone and misunderstood, perhaps rejected— all this makes me feel sad, it feels a bit too much to contain, and I end up thinking about eating kind of knowing that it will help me feel better in the moment.”

This “practice” may sound simple, but it is a significant one.

It is a big step from jumping immediately from the feeling (whatever emotion is triggering your emotional eating) to the action (eating) to stopping for a moment, almost buying us time to gauge what is it that we are feeling before we eat. Because we know that when we eat we won’t feel it anymore as sharply or as poignantly; the food will take the edge off for some time and we may lose the opportunity to fully look at the emotions and the sources of the emotions that trigger us to emotionally eat.

But let’s say you tried doing this and it was too hard

and you found yourself wanting to pause and slow down but couldn’t.

No worries— we are human, right? We can still use this as an experience in which we develop our understanding about our dynamics around food.

So let’s say, continuing with the example, that I felt sad and ate, went to the fridge, got the dessert from last night and mindlessly ate. Similar to when we mindlessly scroll through social media, right? The quality of the feeling is similar, little awareness in the moment and the doing (eating in our case) takes precedence. Our pain is somewhat drowned with the tasty warmth of a drink (and it can absolutely be non-alcoholic one, and it often is) or a good bite.

We can do this retroactively—meaning—if you went and ate before you could sit with the emotions for a few minutes and write down or make a mental note of this cycle—that is ok. Whenever we feel we can, even if it is a day later, let’s sit down and look at what happened a few hours/days back. The look in my boss’ face was unbearable. Getting a D after my months of studying was upsetting. My friends not having invited me to this event made me felt lonely, angry, and resentful. The chaos of the house despite my constant picking up the kids’ everything is demoralizing.

You get the idea. All feelings are valid and all reactions are welcome and embraced. We do not want to judge what we are feeling, only witness it, only note it, with compassion. At this point we are just trying to raise, augment, expand our awareness of this cycle; what usually starts it for you? It can be different things, but we may find patterns over time.

Gradually developing new habits is essential

The idea behind this practice – and notice I don’t call it an exercise but a practice—is to help us develop the habit of reflecting before acting and allow this reflection to inform the acting going forward. For days, weeks, or months we may see little change in the acting but, and this is a big BUT, the work inside is happening. I trust it is a matter of time for our actions to catch up to our level of awareness.

When we become clear about what emotions or situations are triggering our emotional eating, and we are able to develop alternative coping mechanisms that come with a lower price in terms of the toll that they take, we can start conceiving the possibility of having a different relationship with food.

These and other practices are ways of starting to “repair,” to make a space, to process, to look in the eye at our triggering emotions so that are less prone to “repeat” the emotional eating behaviors with the same frequency or in same quantity as before.

 Want to know more?

If you are curious and want to better understand your dynamics around food, I invite you to take the first step— head over to claudiaperolini.com/quiz and take my free quiz to identify what is your # 1 emotional eating trigger. Along with the results, I’ll share tips and resources related to ways to begin to shift your relationship with food.

If you want to walk this path toward freedom and possibility, I would love to support you. You can find more information about ways to stay connected over at claudiaperolini.com

What is your #1 emotional eating trigger?

To your courage as you are walking this new path,

 

Claudia

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The chains of habit that tie us to food