Do you Use Food for Comfort?
When I started doing the work to uncover why I was emotionally eating so much, I realized that one of my biggest reasons was to relax and unwind.
I associated food with comfort and relief.
I remember coming home after a long day at work and feeling so stressed, exhausted, and burnt-out.
Eating was my way of relaxing, unwinding, and shutting off my brain.
It felt like I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders and food was my temporary escape from that burden that felt so heavy.
On my way home I would dream about how amazing it would feel to finally get home and be able to relax and unwind with my food. I would think about what I was going to eat, how delicious it would taste, and how comforting it would feel to finally get the relief I'd been waiting for all day.
By the time I got home my desire for the food was so strong I could hardly stand it. My heart would be racing in anticipation of taking that first bite. My desire felt out of control, compulsive, and animalistic.
The worst part of it was that, yes eating did provide me with the comfort and relief I was desperately seeking, but the escape was temporary and was always followed by guilt, shame and more discomfort.
Emotional discomfort for eating in a way that wasn't aligned with what I truly wanted for myself, and physical discomfort from eating way more than my body needed.
Continuously turning to food for comfort and relief undoubtedly had a net negative effect in my life.
What I didn't realize at the time was that I was using food to feel comfort and relief, but comfort and relief are feelings and feelings are created by thoughts not by food.
Let me repeat that because it's so important:
Food does not create our feelings.
Food is just food.
Only our thoughts create our feelings.
I had to stop giving food the credit and the power of generating comfort and relief for me.
If you can relate to my story and want to stop using food as your #1 source of comfort and relief, the following questions will help you unravel this pattern.
What am I thinking about food and eating that makes me associate it with comfort and relief?
What am I needing comfort and relief from?
What else besides food and eating would I like to associate comfort & relief with?
Remember the feelings of comfort and relief can only be created by your thoughts.
Take what you're thinking about food that makes you feel comfort and relief and apply those same thoughts to something else.
This is how you begin to decondition your brain from associating food with comfort and relief and rewire it to associate these feelings with things that don't have a net negative effect in your life.
Xo,
Khara
P.S.
If you need more help with this let’s setup a free coaching call. It's an opportunity to get personalized guidance on what's keeping you stuck and what you need to do to move forward. Message me to schedule.