Eating Your Feelings (About THAT Person)

Okay, let's talk about this.

Many of us find ourselves irritated or resentful with someone and then standing at the fridge eating our feelings.

So let's talk about what we can do if we find ourselves in that situation.

I want to begin by saying this.

Emotional eating is not the problem here.

Emotional eating has no moral value to it.

We have, of course, heard all the messages that emotional eating is bad, and I address why we think it's so bad, which is to do with it puts weight on our body.

That is the fundamental basis of why we feel fear emotional eating because there might be weight gain associated.

For example, there are many other things we do to alleviate our stress.

We might go for a run, we might sit down and do a jigsaw puzzle, we might do some journaling.

None of that has the moral value that eating does, even though eating is what we have evolved to do in order to actually reduce our emotional stress.

If you think about we have evolved from hunter-gatherers and eating food was something that we absolutely needed to do to survive.

And so we have evolved so that when we eat food, dopamine is released in our brains and our body relaxes.

So eating is actually a fabulous way to relieve our emotional stress.

So let's start from the standpoint that if we're standing in the fridge eating our feelings, the problem isn't the eating.

The problem is often that we have no other way to actually go back to the source of the stress and figure out how to stop being resentful, how to stop being irritated at this person who has clearly riled us up.

So let's start with that.

And I just want to say, if you're in the situation where a person has really irritated you, it might be a friend, it might be a family member, it might be your teenage child, whoever it is.

If you're a woman in our culture, it is unusual to have the skills to actually deal with our emotional state other than to avoid it.

We have been socialized to be good girls and good girls do not show their feelings.

And so we were never role modelled how to actually address what was going on inside, other than appear to be a good girl who is following the rules and doing what she's told on the outside.

So it makes sense, obviously, That if we're socialized in that culture where we don't have the emotional tools to regulate ourselves and eating is going to soothe our nervous systems, that emotional eating would be something that we would engage in.

So if you have ever felt bad for being an emotional eater, listening to this podcast is going to help relieve that for you.