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- Food happens. Toxic thoughts don't have to.
Food happens. Toxic thoughts don't have to.
Food happens. Toxic thoughts don't have to.
I’m having trouble starting this newsletter because my brain can’t figure out how to talk about anything, including intuitive eating, without first at least mentioning how heavy my heart feels given the Israel-Hamas War. I’ve written and rewritten this paragraph about a gajillion times in hopes of coming up with the perfect thing to say but I have to accept that I probably never will.
So for now, I’ll say this: I’m sad, scared, and angry, and if you are, too, here’s a virtual hug.
Speaking of feeling ten different brands of crappy…
Sometimes we eat because we feel a certain way, not because we’re hungry.
(This should shock approximately zero percent of you.)
We eat because we’re bored, sad, or lonely.
Sometimes we eat because munching on M&M’s feels better than starting an intimidating work project or figuring out your username and password to log in to your kid's doctor’s portal and you just cannot deal with recovering one. more. password.
Sometimes we eat because, f*ck it, we’ve already eaten too much/the wrong thing/at the wrong time and tomorrow we’ll start fresh.
We eat because we’re on vacation, we’re at a buffet, or because there’s only a few bites left and we don’t want to waste food.
We eat because it’s someone’s birthday and there is cake and, what are you supposed to say no thanks to a generous slice of heavenly looking birthday cake when every cell in your body is crying out for cake!?
We eat because we don’t have the resources to purchase any food we want anytime we want, and food is available right now.
I could go on (and on and on and on). There really is no shortage of non-hunger reasons we eat. Suffice it to say, this type of eating happens all the time (and there are many times when it absolutely makes sense to eat even if you’re not hungry, which is something I’ll absolutely write about soon.)
The question is: What happens next?
When you eat the cake you promised yourself you’d ignore, do you skip the next meal or extend your workout to “make up for it”? When you raid the pantry after dinner when you weren’t even hungry in the first place, do you feel guilty and ashamed?
What if, instead of judgement, you extended yourself some love, compassion, and curiosity instead? Here’s what that could look like:
As I often tell my clients, it’s okay to notice that you feel overly full or even stuffed after you ate too much.
What’s not okay is adding shame, guilt, and self-loathing to the mix. When you feel bad, there’s nothing to be gained by telling yourself a story that makes you feel even worse (e.g. I’m out of control, I need to reel things in, I will never be able to eat like a normal person, etc.)
Trust me, loathing is not a sustainable strategy for self-improvement.
3 Things worth checking out
If you have four minutes: What if we accepted that having a belly were a normal part of having a body?
If you have five minutes: Life is way too short to worry about the shape and size of your body
If you have four minutes: Fatphobia is rampant in the workplace… but at least we’re talking about it?
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