Episode 158 The Diary of an Emotional Eater: Stop fighting food
Dec 11, 2019
Episode 158 The Diary of an Emotional Eater: Stop fighting food
p>
Hey, how are you? My name is Tammy Marshall and I'm the creator of The Unemotional Eater Protocol.
I just wanted to say hello, on Cyber Monday after Thanksgiving. I probably should have come on before now, because I’m in all these groups and all these people are talking about ‘cheat day’ and how to do ’48 hour water fasts’ to get over what they ate for Thanksgiving and they were bad. I just uh; this stuff drives me nuts. Just go eat food. The whole stress of constantly paying attention to food, constantly being on a diet, thinking about every morsel, it’s so just mind-boggling.
The Lord and I have been talking over the last few days about how we fight the wrong problem. We think our problem is food when really, it’s not. Really, it’s about stress and how we process stress. It’s this connection we have made with food. This can show up in our lives in a lot of ways. A lot of times, people who struggle with food also struggle with money, also struggle with love relationship, it’s kind of an interesting little triangle that happens and it’s never about that.
It’s a heart issue. We want it to be a food issue but it’s an emotional heart issue. That’s where the real work is.
There is this idea of “Just give me one more diet, just tell me what to eat and THAT’s going to fix my problem” but that is not the problem. I wish it were, because all of us have done 52 million diets.
If food was the problem, we would have fixed it by now.
It’s the emotional heart issue that we try to fill up with food that’s really the problem. It’s the lonely, it’s the sad, it’s the familiar, it’s just stress in general, it’s boredom, it’s a lot of things.
Thanksgiving, we kind of hit eating season when we get to Halloween. Halloween starts eating season. We eat a lot of things that are familiar to us; that help us recapture childhood. Which is really love in the wrong places.
I’ve told the story about the lady who had to have peanut butter every day. She had had bariatric surgery, so it wasn’t that she was over-consuming it every day, because she was measuring it. It’s just that she HAD to have it every day. When we first started talking, she was like, “I don’t know where the connection with peanut came from” but quickly, she became really aware that it was just memory she had forgotten. But every night after dinner, she would have peanut butter and saltines with her parents while they watched TV. She didn’t even remember doing that until we started working. So, it’s where love gets in the food and love doesn’t belong in food, it’s just food. Love belongs in our heart.
It’s just about going in and separating those connections we have associated with food. It takes more work. All of us want to take a magic pill or we want to drink that shake or we want to do whatever. But we don’t want to actually look at what is underneath the surface, anymore mine is that I don’t want to go to the gym. I have made that for myself as easy as possible. There are just some things that we want to have magical thinking about, that something is just going to fix it. You and I both, we’ve done those things and we get some immediate gratification usually, but it is not sustainable. I’m all about sustainable relationship with food. Starting to look at food as nourishment, rather than as:
• What I do when I’m stressed
• What I do when I’m sad
• What I do when –-
A lot of us, we eat our emotions, rather than having a concrete way in order to process them. A lot of times, we don’t even know that we have having emotions, so I work a lot with just taking every thought captive, so that you can understand what is going on. For me, personally, and a lot of times for my clients, they didn’t even know that they were having emotions. What they knew is they wanted donuts. I knew I wanted donuts. I did not know that I was having emotions. As I started disconnecting from the donuts, is when I realized that I was actually experiencing emotions. I was able to get those things out of my body, so I was no longer walking around with this low-level anxiety all the time, that I needed to eat. That’s really what I teach people how to do, is to recognize what is going on in their body, so they can start taking care of it.
I was checking one of these silly groups and somebody else was talking about “Oh, I didn’t cheat on Thanksgiving” and it’s just like I’m not really sure:
A. What you cheat when you eat. That is such a really weird word for food world. Cheating has so much connotation around getting in trouble and being punished. Cheating is bad, we learned all our lives that cheating is bad. So, why would we associate cheat and food?
B. We are going to win “some prize” because we did eat – I don’t eat pumpkin pie or pecan pie – but somehow we are going to win some prize.
If you don’t know, I have a group going on. I work with people individually. I don’t work with a lot of people individually, because I only have so much time to do that. So, if you are kind of tired of fighting this whole diet game, then let’s have a conversation.
Otherwise, I’ll tell you to go love on somebody. It’s a big crazy world out there and everybody just needs some kindness. Just a little bit of love. Just a smile, open a door, say thank you. I will tell you for the person who’s being a jerk today, give them a double helping. Make a choice to give them a double helping, which is hard. We want to burn those people for being ugly; but it’s like they’re the ones that need the double helping. So, it is truly an act of your will, and act of your kindness, to go give them an extra heaping of love.
Go do that...
• put somebody’s cart back
• buy somebody a cup of coffee
• do some act of kindness in the world
I will always tell you to go love you first. A lot of times, most of the people I work with are women and we have a tendency to take care of everybody on the planet but ourselves. So, it is out of that exhaustion that we have a tendency to eat, because it is our way of filling ourselves back up, it’s our way of finding some pleasure when we have given everything away.
So, I’ll tell you to go love on yourself first. I’m talking about more than getting a pedicure or a massage, those are good things, but how are you tending to your heart? How are you taking care of you? Whether that is rest, whether that’s meditation, whether that’s taking time to journal, whether that’s going for a walk.
I am telling you; I have flipped off and stuck my tongue out at all of those suggestions, but it’s what works because it is about tending to our own heart. I hope you have a blessed day. If you are caught up in diet-world, let’s talk, because it’s just not a place to live. I am telling you, there is freedom with food where you can eat the things you want to eat and you can weigh what you want to weigh, and you just don’t have to fight anymore. To me, that’s a pretty sweet thing.
Talk to you soon, blessings!
1.2K Views
Stay connected with the Unemotional Eater!
Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates Tammy.
Don't worry, your information will not be shared.
