We all go through challenging moments when we need to soothe ourselves. If you have a history of dieting and food restriction, chances are that you will soothe with food. After a stressful day, you are wired and tired and reach for a bag of chips as a balm for your nervous system. That is perfectly okay and not to be judged. Emotional eating is a coping tool, not a coping failure. If you are looking for alternative coping methods, it’s useful to have a toolkit to comfort yourself when you are feeling stressed or anxious. Having techniques that can regulate our emotions to provide a sense of ea ..read more

“We eat the way we eat because we are afraid to feel what we feel.”  – Geneen Roth – This quote by Geneen Roth says it all. Eating to avoid feelings is about avoiding feeling the emotional discomfort of life’s challenges. It could be dealing with anxiety, boredom, depression, loneliness or all of these emotions. The urge to eat emotionally is mostly because we don’t want to feel the way we feel. Emotional eating is not really a problem with food or eating. It is a feeling problem. We eat to soothe ourselves. Our core need is not to eat, but to feel better. When our needs are not being m ..read more

“I eat my feelings.” I hear this so often. I used to struggle with this myself. My clients carry such shame and guilt about eating emotionally, as if they are inadequate in some way. Emotional eating is a way to distract ourselves from unpleasant feelings. It is also a way to numb more difficult emotions. It’s a normal human response, yet diet culture leads us to believe that when we eat emotionally, it’s because we lack willpower and control. That emotional eating is a sign of weakness. Let’s look at the role of food in our lives. Food is emotional. We celebrate with food, we connect with foo ..read more

Overcoming emotional eating is one of the most difficult aspects of making peace with food. Few of us are able to totally overcome or end emotional eating and most of us will still use food from time to time as a way to cope – and that is perfectly fine. We simply need to do it from a place of kindness and curiosity. I often say emotional eating does not need to be emotional overeating. We can use food to soothe our negative emotions in a mindful way, you can read more about how to do that here. We need to remind ourselves that emotional eating is not a problem with food or eating. It is a soo ..read more

“A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others.” — Brene Brown — I am overwhelmed by the messages of support and care in response to last week’s blog. My deepest thanks to everyone who reached out. I felt so connected  and touched by the warmth of each message. It made me think of our shared common humanity and that it doesn’t matte ..read more

My anxiety has been sky high. In South Africa we are in the middle of our 3rd wave. There are no available beds in the hospitals. The vaccine roll-out has been slow. There is so much loss and pain. It’s scary. I have been baking cakes and scones. Eating sweets. I want to keep ordering food and keep my pantry full. I don’t want to be deprived of anything I may want in a whim. I am too scared to be out there. I feel guilty that I have the luxury of working from home. Right now, we’re all okay, yet I am frightened. My mind goes to …“if only I could be vaccinated.” “What if I get Covid and need to ..read more

I remember the build-up to birthdays. I would start off the year saying by the 4th of June, I am going to be at my goal weight. The calculation would begin. That gives me 6 months. If I lose x much per month by my birthday, I will weigh x. Ugh. My birthday arrives. Some years, I am at the desired number. Some years I’m not. One thing was for sure. My birthday was one big binge. It wasn’t only a birthday – it became a birthMONTH! A free for all. I would eat cake. cheese. sweets. carbs. Anything and everything on my forbidden list in large quantities. Because of course, after my birthday, I woul ..read more

At the best of times many of us struggle with emotional eating. In the last year, with the pandemic throwing us off course, eating challenges have increased. Emotional eating is a way we cope with unpleasant emotions. It’s a way to distract ourselves from difficult feelings. It’s a normal human response, yet diet culture leads us to believe that when we eat emotionally, it’s because we lack willpower and control. That emotional eating is a sign of weakness. One of the symptoms of dieting is a disconnection from ourselves, from our body sensations and from our emotions. When we follow food rule ..read more

Right now, the world out there feels like a scary movie. Half the world is in varying degrees of lockdown. People are isolating at home. Most people are stressed and anxious. Some are working from home, which comes with its own set of challenges. Others are not working or earning an income, and feeling stress about finances. Many people are experiencing a sense of isolation, boredom or loneliness. How do we cope in times like these? We can throw ourselves into work, spend hours worrying, get busy and clean the house furiously, watch Netflix series or we can eat. People who had eating challenge ..read more

When I started to change my relationship with food and eating, it was very hard for me to tell the difference between stomach hunger and emotional hunger. Every time I felt anything in my belly I interpreted it as the need to eat. It can be quite tricky to tell the difference at times because the hollow feeling in your stomach from hunger can be similar to the empty feeling of sadness or loneliness. The cramps or constrictions in our belly from anxiety are similar to the contractions of stomach hunger.  There are many other reasons we eat other than stomach and emotions – I wrote about th ..read more