October 2005 Insights - Stopping Emotional Eating

In the Becoming A Naturally Slim Workshop, most participants know they eat for emotional reasons. They might list all kinds of reasons from frustration to sadness to boredom to hurt, and most have favorite foods for specific moods. Knowing they are eating for emotional reasons does not mean they’re successful at stopping the habit. That’s because they’re trying to stop with willpower, when the behavior they’re trying to control doesn’t occur at a level controlled by willpower. That’s why it doesn’t work.
The first step in controlling emotional eating is to understand that there are physical reasons it is happening. That means the stopping has to occur at the physical level, which is not accessed from your thinking process. Somehow society conveys the messages that if we eat for emotional reasons then we lack willpower, or are stupid, or lazy – that’s a crock. The frustrating part is that if you’ve absorbed some of that messaging, even reluctantly, you don’t stop to think that it’s wrong. No one eats because they are lazy. No one eats because they are stupid. With the possible exception of a few master yogis in the depths of India and some elderly Buddhist monks, willpower cannot control your body chemistry, so that’s not going to help you. What can help is knowing some real truths about emotional eating, and some concrete tools for addressing the issues.
There are a lot of elements that influence emotional eating, so I’ll start with one element that is common to all the other influences: chemical addiction. Of course, as soon as the word addiction is used it sounds like I’m talking about something that needs an AA meeting. This is not the kind of addiction you’re used to, and you’ll need to think of it a different way. This addiction is related to your body’s expectations regarding its own chemical state.
To make sense of this, it’s important to comprehend that emotion is a chemical state in the body. When anyone feels any emotion, their body is flooded with chemistry that interacts with their entire body at the cellular level. You’ve probably heard of some of those chemicals, such as adrenaline, endorphins, and cortisol. At any given moment, your body is in a chemical state of your current emotions.
One funny thing about the body is that it likes the familiar. In fact, because of survival instinct, it resists the unfamiliar (which might be deadly, after all.) And it likes familiar chemical states, because that’s how your body experiences life.
Here’s one of many possible examples. Your body has a memory of your life experiences as a sequence of chemical states. It thinks of eating dinner with your family as a chemical state, we’ll call that one D. It thinks of the feeling you get when someone criticizes you as a chemical state, which we’ll call C.
What if, when you were a child, at dinner you sometimes got criticized for certain things. Perhaps it was your homework, or the state of your bedroom, or your table manners. That event of being criticized at dinner creates an association in your body. The chemical state of eating dinner gets hooked up with the chemical state of being criticized, so D goes with C. Your body doesn’t distinguish circumstances, because it’s not the thinking part of you, it just considers that a D goes with a C.
So guess what happens if you experience being criticized when you’re not eating dinner? D goes with C. Therefore, your body wants to recreate that comfortable and familiar emotional and chemical state. I realize being criticized is not a comfortable state, but for your body the comfort is in the fact that it has happened before, and you survived it. To recreate the state you survived, which makes it comfortable at the physical level, you have to eat. Eating changes your body chemistry, so that it matches the combination of D and C. Sounds bizarre, but that’s how it works.
You’ll notice that none of this has anything to do with your thinking processes. If that pattern is one you have, at no time are you thinking “Oh, I’ve been criticized, so I must recreate my childhood association with dinner by eating.” None of this happens at the conscious level.
What are other kinds of associations that might be happening at that low-level chemical cellular level? It’s easy to notice them when you get the idea.

* Being hungry in the morning and desiring a sugar fix to raise your blood sugar associated with the frustration of work, because you’re usually rushing to get ready for work with low blood sugar. What does that tell you about donuts and work, or that late-afternoon chocolate bar?

Take a moment and think about this. You have these associations. There are times you reach for food – probably a specific kind of food – that have nothing to do with your thinking process. If you’re paying attention, you’re probably berating yourself for doing the eating and feeling horrible because you’re eating anyway.
This makes sense, but how can you stop it? There are various kinds of energy work that can break the association that was established. I’ll describe one you can try. Like most tools, it sounds simple and unlikely, but it works.
The first step is to decide you’re willing to remove the association. This is an important step, because your body associates this association with coping and with survival. In many cases, the food provides a comfort in a negative situation, such as criticism, and if you remove the association you’re stuck dealing with the negative without the comfort of food. Personally, I find the fat more uncomfortable than the other situations that make me uncomfortable, so I’ve chosen to remove the associations. You have to decide for yourself. You have to decide that you are willing to deal with the negative situation, whether it’s a family event filled with conversations you’d rather not have or a movie with murder and mayhem you didn’t really realize was bothering you. You also have to decide that you can survive that negative situation, even without the food. Sounds corny, but that’s how your body functions: it wants to survive.
Once you’ve decided to remove the associations, one technique is visualization. Sit quietly and let yourself breath slowly. Breathing slowly is important because it helps keep your body calm during a change. Your body doesn’t like change.
First, imagine that you’re sitting inside a big ball of white light that’s gently spinning so the light is moving through you. The white light helps the change happen because that’s your intention.
Imagine that you can see wiring inside your body. You’ve got lots of wiring, so imagine that for now, what you can see is the wiring that associates ONE emotional situation with eating. It’s important to start with doing one at a time, so that your intention is clear. There are methods for clearing multiple associations, but I won’t get into that here. The reason you visualize the wiring as an emotional situation associated with eating is because you’re dealing with that physical chemistry. Whether it’s eating dinner with the family or getting ready for work, it’s all a chemical state for your body, so it’s all an emotional program that you’re addressing.
Imagine you can see wires that connect an emotional situation with an eating trigger. People get all kinds of images when they imagine. It might look like two balloons connected by a string. It might look like two blobs of goo connected by a stream of liquid. If you’re not visual, it might feel like a sensation in two different parts of your body, or even all over your body. There’s no wrong way to feel this, it’s just about noticing something happening. It can be subtle, like feeling a little cold.
When you notice something happening, think about the fact that it’s not serving you any more, and being rid of it. Remember you’re inside the big ball of white light. Imagine that as the light spins, it dissolves that association, melting it away. As the light spins, it continues to dissolve that association, and the light dissolves the habit of your reaction to the association, and the light dissolves all the triggers created by that association. Let the light keep spinning until you feel it is done.
It’s okay if you have to do it more than once. The association has been there for a long time, so it might take a bit of effort to remove it all.
The first sign of success is when you notice that you’re thinking about the food you usually eat in a situation, but you’re not eating it! I suggest you keep using the light, especially if you know you’re going into a situation that’s a trigger, such as a big family dinner. You want to get every single remnant of that association. Keep using the white light until you can be in the situation, and you’re consistently not eating. If you know you’re going into a trigger situation, having the white light spinning will help reduce your emotional reaction, too.
Here’s a little summary of the instructions:

1. Put yourself in a spinning ball of light.