Why do you eat when you’re not hungry?
I’ve heard many reasons why – I’m bored, I’m stressed, I’m sad, I feel a strong urge to eat, or because everyone else is and I don’t want to feel left out.
Do you see a common theme here?
It’s always driven by a feeling.
Or actually, it’s driven by not wanting to feel a feeling.
You don’t want to feel that urge, or bored, stressed, sad, left out and why?
Because those are not fun feelings to feel.
And what will happen if you don’t eat when you feel them?
You’ll have to face those feelings.
That’s the real problem here.
If you don’t eat you’ll have to feel however it is you’re feeling and you just don’t want to do that.
But when you eat to avoid a feeling, and your goal is to stop binge eating and/or to lose weight, you’re most likely going to bring on more feelings you don’t want to be feeling – regret, shame, guilt, etc.
So you’re eating to avoid discomfort and are in turn creating discomfort.
It just doesn’t make sense, right?
But that’s what you’ve trained yourself to do because of how you’ve habitually thought about what food does for you.
You feel bored and eating will cure the boredom.
You feel sad and eating will make you feel better.
You feel an urge to binge and eating a ton of food will relieve you from that urge.
That’s essentially what you’re thinking.
And because it actually does work for a short time, that’s what you remember in that moment of discomfort.
In that moment you’re not thinking about what’s coming after, all that matters is right then and there.
That quick fix, eating, is the easiest way you know how to make yourself feel better. But it doesn’t last.
Let’s use an example here of a button falling off your shirt and you don’t really know how to sew (if you’re a sewing master, pretend you’re not for a minute, k?). You do a half-assed job of sewing it back on, just so you can wear it right now. Then you wash it, the button falls off again, you do a crappy sewing job again, and it falls off again in the wash. This continues on and on and you keep having to deal with the bullshit of re-sewing the button. Even though your method clearly isn’t really working, you keep doing it because it’s the only way you know.
But just because it’s the only way you know, doesn’t mean it’s the only way there is.
This could all be solved if you just learned how to sew properly, just like you wouldn’t eat when you’re not hungry if you learned how to feel properly.
If you learn how to feel instead of eat then you won’t have to keep dealing with the consequences of eating instead of feeling.
Boredom isn’t going to go away and neither is stress, sadness, or any other uncomfortable feeling. But what can go away is how you deal with them.
I’m here to help you do that.
If you want to learn how to feel instead of eat, schedule a free mini session with me. We can talk about the specific emotions you’re trying to avoid and how you can feel them instead of eat because of them.
You can learn a new way of dealing with your emotions that will benefit you for the rest of your life.
