The habitual part of emotional eating.

One of the things I’m really big on is helping women separate their eating habits from who they are as a person.

We have so much effing judgment around food and how we eat and it kinda pisses me off that we make it mean negative things about ourselves.

Because when we feel bad about ourselves, we eat.

So let’s be clear… emotional eating might be something you do, but it isn’t who you are.

One of the ways I like to disconnect the action with our identity is to talk about the habit part of it.

Many of us were taught to use food to manage our emotions. Feeling sad? Have a cookie.

It’s a learned behavior and something we’ve done so many times that our brain made it a habit.

That’s one of the brain’s jobs… automate stuff we do regularly so we can save energy to think and do other things.

Once you do it a few times, the habit just fires automatically without you even having to think about it (which is why it can feel like you have no control). 

Feel bad. Eat food. Feel relief. Repeat. No thought required.

I mean… it’s actually pretty cool. But also a problem when you’re doing something you want to stop doing.

So you learned at a young age that when you feel bad, food gives you relief. And it was likely already habituated long before you could apply logic and conscious thought to it.

Then as you got older and your life got more complex, likely so did your emotional life. And your brain just applied the same concept to a wider range of “negative” emotions.

The good news is that since it’s a habit your brain programmed, it can also deprogram it. 

Knowing this actually helped me to take all the drama out of my eating behavior and opened me up to looking for solutions rather than just thinking my overeating was a character flaw I couldn’t change.

I still had to work on managing my emotions without food, of course.

But understanding the habit part showed me that some of my overeating wasn’t due to a lack of self-control, it was an automated habit response firing before I had enough awareness to stop it.