Written by: Marcella Friel, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Sandy was making great progress in curbing her emotional eating. Even with the rollercoaster demands of work, family, and social life, Sandy’s unwavering commitment to self-care at the start of her day was paying big dividends of self-esteem. At work, Sandy felt happy and empowered as she strode past the office breakroom snacks that would have set off her bingeing.
She was finally gaining the traction she had wanted for so long, and it felt sooo good.
Yet at day’s end, Sandy still clung to her nightly treat of Good & Plenty candy as she settled in for her evening TV.
When, in an online class, I invited Sandy to reflect on her earliest experience of Good & Plenty, she wistfully recalled,
“My father loved Good & Plenty and would eat it all the time. We’d eat it together as our little ‘thing.’ I’ve missed him so much since he’s been gone … I never realized it before … but the Good & Plenty has been how I’ve kept Dad around.”
As I led Sandy and others in the class through several rounds of EFT (also called Emotional Freedom Techniques, or Tapping), Sandy realized, “Good & Plenty is my dad’s food and not mine. I can smile at Good & Plenty as a reminder of him but not eat it.”
Sandy tossed the Good & Plenty in the trash and hasn’t eaten it since.
What Is Emotional Eating?
The Mayo Clinic defines emotional eating as “a way to suppress or soothe negative emotions, such as stress, anger, fear, boredom, sadness, and loneliness. Major life events or, more commonly, the hassles of daily life can trigger negative emotions that lead to emotional eating and disrupt your weight-loss efforts.”
Throughout history, we humans have used food not just to nourish our bodies but to celebrate wins, grieve losses, and close deals. No wonder, then, that when we feel any of the emotions just cited—and to those I would add happiness and excitement as well—that we reach for food as our comforting companion, even when we’re not really hungry.
Nowadays, in our world of increasing uncertainty, withering isolation, and technological enmeshment, the seemingly benign urge to “love ourselves” with “treats” can morph into a life-draining, weight-gaining, monkey-on-our-back substance addiction as tough to kick as any of the toughest stuff.
The Limits of Willpower
The conventional solution to emotional eating, espoused by the Mayo Clinic and others, suggests a behavioral-management approach to the problem:
Keep a food diary and track what you eat.
Eat healthy snacks instead of junky ones.
Don’t keep the hard stuff in the house.
Join a weight-loss club.
Manage your stress.
And so on.
What I now know for sure is that, while all these tactics certainly have their place in a health-supportive lifestyle, for Sandy and others like her who have joined my Women, Food & Forgiveness Academy, such measures are still just a binge waiting to happen.
(If you’ve gotten this far in reading this article, you probably know what I mean.)
As Einstein famously said, trying to fix the problem at the level of the problem is no fix at all. Willpower alone is an unworthy opponent when it comes to emotional eating.
When we try to “just say no” to the Good & Plenty by reaching for carrot sticks instead, the addiction ends up doing pushups in the corner of our psyche, waiting for the weak link in our resolve to inevitably surface right at the moment the pastry tray gets passed around at that dreadfully boring company meeting.
What Really Works
Sandy’s association of the Good & Plenty with her father’s memory was a powerful aha moment for her. But if her transformation had stopped there, she might have just kept on bingeing.
Even more powerful was to disperse the painful emotions associated with that memory using tools such as EFT.
Emotions, by their nature, are e-motion, if you will, or energy in motion. Emotions arise, they dwell, and they subside. If you’ve ever had a sudden outburst of anger that quickly dissipated, then you know what I mean.
This is emotional freedom. It’s not that we never feel angry or sad, it’s that those feelings can come and go within a broader equanimity.
Emotions become difficult when they hook onto an associative memory, in which case they can lodge in our energetic field and get stuck for days, years, or lifetimes. Unresolved painful feelings, often arising from past traumas, can later manifest as degenerative disease and substance addictions such as that fueled by emotional eating.
EFT gently and powerfully reduces the negative impact of memories and incidents that trigger stress. Some have called EFT emotional acupuncture, as it involves fingertip tapping points at or near the end of major acupuncture meridians. The tapping disrupts the stress signals that link negative emotions to a particular experience.
When Sandy was able to use EFT to clear the emotional muck connected to the candy, she saw it for what it was. She could appreciate her dad’s love of the Good & Plenty but was no longer compelled to eat it herself. The feelings resume their natural flow, and into the trash the Good & Plenty goes.
Buh-bye emotional eating. Hello emotional freedom!
What has your emotional eating cost you? What does it continue to cost you? And what might become possible in your life, your career, and your relationships if emotional eating were no longer corroding your soul?
Feel free to drop me a line. I’d love to hear from you.
Use the code BRAINZJAN to receive a 20% discount on Marcella’s online course, From Emotional Eating to Emotional Freedom.
Marcella Friel, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
MARCELLA FRIEL is a mindful eating mentor who helps health-conscious women love and forgive themselves, their food, and their figure.
Marcella is author of "Tap, Taste, Heal: Use Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) to Eat Joyfully and Love Your Body."
In 2018 Marcella founded the Women, Food & Forgiveness Academy, an online transformational mentorship program to help health-conscious women heal the emotional and metabolic roots of yo-yo dieting, binge eating, sugar addiction, and chronic body shaming.
Marcella draws on nearly 3 decades of 12-step recovery and 35 years’ practice of Tibetan Buddhism to help women heal the self-hatred traumas that lie at the very root of their nervous system. She passionately holds an unflinching faith in trauma as the catalyst of evolution and guides others in dowsing their life experiences to find the gold amidst the dross.
Learn more about Marcella by visiting marcellafriel.com
