Emotional Eating and the Holidays

Holidays can be intense. This year has a whole other layer of intensity with corona virus and everything being on pause. If you’re lucky, maybe you have an easy breezy time with it. If that's the case, this blog post is not for you. But if you’re challenged by family triggers, feeling isolated, and/or lots of food mixed with overeating, binge eating, emotional eating, and/or purging, this blog is for you.

Before discovering Ayurveda, I struggled for MANY years with emotional eating and binge eating. And in my struggles and research, I’ve learned that it’s a symptom of something else. Of something deeper. Of a deeper hunger that’s not being fed, or a discomfort that’s trying to be avoided.

As humans, we want to be in pleasure and joy all the time, so if we aren't, we’re going to try our hardest to get ourselves to a pleasurable state. The act of eating is very pleasurable. The tastes and textures can be so incredible. But eating in excess for reasons other than hunger can lead to serious digestive imbalances. I know this, because I did this, and it led me to serious digestive imbalances. It takes a lot of time, effort, care, and money to unwind yourself from the damage that can be caused from this pattern.

I used to use food as my one and only go-to pleasure, no matter what I was feeling, I used food to get me out of it. I learned this when I was young. It was the most accessible and acceptable substance. Everyone eats. Everyone needs to eat. Food is everywhere. And so it became the substance that was the fixer of all things. But I was just trading one discomfort for another. One pain for a different pain. And eventually I realized that I'm just perpetuating a pain loop. Digging the hole deeper and deeper of pain and discomfort. To the point that I caused my digestive tract severe harm and with that came IBS, leaky gut, SIBO, and a laundry list of food allergies.

In Ayurveda, digestion is the number one cause of good health or dis-ease. Everything starts with digestion. So mending your digestion by mending your relationship to food, and to pleasure is essential.

Unlike other providers that tell you to “just do this, or don’t eat that” and expect it to fix everything, focus on recommendations and insights to actually break the loop and start liberating yourself from the pattern in order to create healthier new ones.

Recommendations for getting out of the loop of emotional eating, digestive pain, and discomfort: