We all have demons to battle in this life. Except some of us choose to use food to exercise these demons. Using food to make you feel happier can quickly cause many health problems, including weight gain and depression. This kind of self abuse needs addressing and stopping before it stops you.
Learn to Accept You Have a Problem
Food can be used in two ways – one is to abuse the body and make it tired, overweight and trigger some scary diseases and the other is to create incredible health where you thrive. There is no in-between when it comes to food.
What kind of relationship do you have with food? Perhaps this is the first time you have ever been asked this question, but take some time to address it in case you are using food to address an emotional issue.
As its good for us to all admit when we have an emotional issue that need resolving, and that if you are using food in an abusive way to solve them – to learn how to deal with them effectively.
But the first person you need to admit that you are using food to mend your internal hurt too is to yourself. This is the first and most important person that needs to hear this admittance.
From here you can truly begin to break the cycle of using food to heal your pain, and the only way forward is up.
Why Food Abuse Occurs
People who use food to emotionally feel better about themselves usually do so because something terribly sad has happened in their life. This could range from losing a loved one (someone passing away or the natural breakdown of a relationship with a lover or friend), having been sexually abused, mentally abused or physically abused.
Sometimes these feelings can occur not by a tragic event occurring but by the way we translate the messages society puts out their in magazines and television shows about how we should look and as a result these messages can make some people left feeling like they don’t fit in / don’t look right / aren’t slim enough / aren’t perfect enough and so on.
It is from sitting with the emotional aftermath of a tragic experience or interpreting a magazine or televisions message wrongly that sad feelings result and it is as a result of not knowing how to cope with this sadness, food often seems like an all to easy way to fix these uncomfortable and often scary to deal with feelings.
How Food Abuse Can Damage Your Health
This way of self-loving is nothing more than self-abuse as eating to deal with unresolved / uncomfortable feelings can, the longer they are left, lead to a variety of eating disorders such as;
- Binge eating
- Over eating
- Under eating
- Making yourself sick
All of which can cause some serious problems such as;
- Weight gain
- Hormonal problems (e.g. the thyroid gland from yo-yo dieting)
- Heart problems (from the pressure of the excess weight)
- Mental health problems
- Suicide
Quit Being in a Toxic Relationship with Food
Food isn’t to blame for your weight gain and neither is a supposed lack of self control that you keep searching for to save the day. In fact, your unhealthy relationship with food (which can as seen above show up in many different ways), is only there because you didn’t understand how to deal with the sadness you feel inside from the moment it first occurred in a healthier way.
The take home message from me to you is that it is OK to feel pain and sadness and to learn your emotional triggers for you choosing food to comfort and console you. When you feel like devouring a whole box of chocolates stop and ask yourself –
“ Am I actually hungry or simply eating these to feel happy?”
You do have a choice and its by stopping and thinking every time you eat you learn to break the negative cycle with food.
Perhaps we feel like its not OK to have a problem and discuss it because it seems there is a stigma attached to not being happy all the time. And to admit we are having a tough time may be seen as an act of weakness. This not the case at all – you are a human being, not a robot. You were born with emotions, all that needs to be tweaked is how you deal with them to achieve a better mental state of health, which in turn will help improve your physical health.
Practising Healthy Self Love is the Only Solution to Healing your Sadness
And this involves:
- speaking to yourself in a kind and loving way DAILY
- choosing healthy food that supports building a strong, healthy body and mind
- choosing to spend time doing things for you on a regular basis (walking in a field, having your hair done, reading a book etc)
- accepting you have flaws, but accepting you also have some outstanding qualities
- accepting you have made some mistakes but that you also have the rest of your life to put them right
The best thing of all about the solution being a prescription of self-love is that all of the ways to start self-loving can begin immediately! And the more you repeat the self-loving exercises, the more they will become like a second nature, and a healthy habit. Leaving your old negative eating habits by the wayside.
So, start focusing on nurturing healthy habits, be it from eating better to speaking to yourself better. And start ditching your unhealthy relationship with food that doesn’t love you back and isn’t actually fixing your sadness or unresolved unhappiness and has simply been a ‘crutch’ merely propping you up for years in some cases, or like a plaster simply masking the problem that is festering and rotting underneath waiting to be dealt with. Here is your chance. Deal with your emotional problems in a healthy way to end your toxic food relationship.