Embrace intuitive eating and intentional living
Emotional eating is eating in response to a stimulus and not in response to hunger. In change, intuitive eating is paying attention to what your body and your mind need, and it is actually a way of living. Your healthy eating habits will become your “new nature,” and you will be able to eat and live in a healthy and nutritious way without being confined to odious diet plans that not only may not work but may also lead to the development of eating disorders and low self-esteem. Intuitive eating is allowing you to be at peace with yourself.
We need to develop coping mechanisms that will help us to respond properly to many emotions. Our big problem is that we are defenceless in front of emotional factors, and then we end up eating and overeating, finding a refuge in food as a comfort and disregarding the fact that food is nutrition and information, not a comfort bubble.
A coping mechanism will be your main tool you can have at hand every time you are facing a certain emotional factor. Without a proper emotional mechanism, you will find yourself very vulnerable in front of an emotional factor. The way we respond is our personal choice, but learning how to cope when a certain emotion lands on our lives will definitely be a game changer.
How many times have you opened your fridge door, grasping any food at hand, when you have experienced a bad day at work? You may have sought comfort in food when you felt stressed or depressed, when you had passed through rough times, when you had felt that everything was crushing around you.
All those factors may lead to negative emotions that, in their turn, will lead to negative thoughts, negative self-talk, and inappropriate responses and actions.
A first step in understanding your emotional eating and starting your emotional healing journey is developing a healthy relationship with food. This has nothing to do with eating healthy meals and having a nutritious and optimal diet, but it is rather about the reason you are eating, and it is more about the WHY questions.
Ask yourself: why am I eating certain foods? Is this because it makes me feel better for the moment? Is it because I feel bored and I have lost any direction?
You may have a poor relationship with food if:
- You feel ashamed after you jump on food every time you are facing certain emotions.
- You are labelling some foods as “bad and forbidden.”
- You are not listening to your own body’s hunger signal.
- You have become very obsessed with calories and very restricted with your diet.
- You weigh everything you are eating.
- You are jumping from one diet to another.
In this program we will guide you and help you step by step to set yourself free from eating emotionally and embracing intuitive eating.
