chapter 7 Principle Seven

Cope with Your Feelings Without Using Food

Find ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve your issues without using food. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, and anger are emotions we all experience throughout life. Each has its own trigger, and each has its own appeasement. Food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you into a food hangover. But food won’t solve the problem. If anything, eating for an emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. You’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion, as well as the discomfort of overeating.

In most cultures, food is used to celebrate, to comfort, and to nurture family and friends. It’s no wonder that we learn to connect emotions and eating. When you add dieting to the mix, however, it wreaks emotional havoc: studies show that dieters have an increased risk of using food to cope with their emotions (Péneau et al. 2013). This is another important reason to reject dieting and practice the tools of Intuitive Eating!

It might be hard to believe, but each act of eating in your life has served you in some way, but some acts have caused you emotional distress and physical discomfort. On a basic level, eating offers nourishment, pleasure, and sometimes comfort. For some people, eating becomes a way of managing or escaping emotions—numbing your feelings. This can range from choosing not to eat (food restriction) to emotional overeating.

This chapter focuses on overeating, but any eating behavior that you engage in for the purpose of escaping emotions is a way of using food to cope. There doesn’t necessarily need to be drama and angst involved. Some people use food in this way to deal with a prolonged stressful event, such as a divorce or taking care of a dying relative, but many others are trying to cope with the ordinary and minor irritations of life, like boredom.

The manner in which you were raised can impact your ability to effectively cope with life’s ups and downs. If your parents or caregivers helped you develop positive coping skills, such as the ability to speak up, to show emotions, and to receive comfort from others, life’s challenges (and irritations) can more easily be met. On the other hand, if your parents were emotionally distant, abusive, or neglectful, or simply unable to cope with problems themselves, you may find yourself turning to destructive coping mechanisms, because you learned no other way to manage life’s challenges. When you throw dieting into the fray, you may find yourself catapulted into seeking solace in food, regardless of how you were raised.

The activities in this chapter will help you to:

distinguish between emotional eating and non-attuned eating as a result of insufficient self-care;
evaluate the pros and cons of emotional eating;
identify underlying feelings and how these feelings may trigger the need to cope by using food;
identify what you are feeling and what you really need in those times when you want to continue eating even though you aren’t hungry and your body doesn’t need any nourishment;
strengthen your coping mechanisms for dealing with your feelings; and
learn to prepare for and rehearse stressful events.

Detecting Your Vulnerability to Eating Problems: It Might Not Be Emotions!

Many people believe that they are compulsive overeaters or binge eaters because they watch themselves eat excessively. In fact, many of these people are misdiagnosing themselves. Before you can explore the emotional connections you may have with eating, it’s first imperative to determine whether your non-attuned eating is actually based on difficulties you are having handling emotions. Or, rather, is it a consequence of lacking self-care or of the deprivation you feel from a lingering diet mentality?

Self-Care: Reevaluating the Basics

If self-care is lacking, it’s hard to be attuned and accurately hear the inner cues of hunger and fullness. Under these circumstances, food can become more rewarding. Review the Self-Care Assessment you completed in chapter 2 and reflect on how you are doing. Then proceed with the rest of this section, which provides a more in-depth look at several key components of self-care: sleep, life balance, nourishment, and stress.

Sleep

The National Sleep Foundation’s (http://www.sleepfoundation.org) research has shown that the optimal amount of sleep for a teenager is eight to ten hours per night; and for an adult, seven to nine hours. If you are not consistently getting adequate sleep, it’s likely that you’re walking around feeling lethargic, with low energy.

Many people who are sleep deprived believe that their lack of energy can be corrected by eating more. And while it’s true that digested food releases physical energy from calories to keep the body functioning and to perform daily tasks, extra food doesn’t compensate for a lack of sleep. Eating doesn’t wake you up—in fact, it can actually make you feel more sluggish and drowsy.

What can you do to increase the hours and quality of sleep you get per night?

Turn off all electronic devices early in the evening. Exposure to the light from computer, phone, and television screens is known to stimulate the brain and keep you awake. (You may want to consider changing to “night shift” to reduce the impact of the light on your mobile phone.)
Set the intention to go to bed at approximately the same time each night and to get up at the same time every morning—even on weekends.
Exercise during the day to promote better sleep.
Keep your bedroom cool.
Avoid caffeine after the morning hours. Caffeine can stay in your system for up to ten hours.
Reduce alcohol intake. Although alcohol is a depressant, which initially makes you feel relaxed and sleepy, research shows that it actually disrupts your sleep and interferes with your body’s sleep regulation (Paddock 2014).

List which of these changes you could make to improve your sleep patterns:

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Life Balance

Sometimes it feels like an impossible task to keep all the balls rolling in your life. Often this is a problem of abundance. There may be many aspects of your life that appeal to you, but you may not have the time for them all. Or it could be an abundance of life’s problems. In either case, make it an important goal to be realistic about how much time you can spend in any one area of your life.

Think about the balance among the following aspects of your life: work, play, family, movement, rest, and relationships. Where do you think your life might be out of balance (if at all)?

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What can you do to reduce the time you spend on certain areas to provide more opportunities for other aspects of your life, which are currently taking the back seat? (For ideas, you can review the Self-Care Assessment in chapter 2.)

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Nourishment

When you eat consistently and adequately, you’ll avoid entering a state of primal hunger, which often results in overeating when your brain senses semi-starvation. If you’re struggling with this, it is important to review the practices in chapter 2, Honor Your Hunger.

Do you eat at least three meals and two snacks a day, without going too long between eating? Yes ________ No ________
Does each of your meals have a balance of protein, carbohydrates, and fat? Yes ________ No ________
Have you recently increased your amount of physical activity? Yes ________ No ________
Did you start a new medication, which may have increased your hunger? Yes ________ No ________

Have you changed your pattern of eating? That is, have you started eating lighter meals or having a snack instead of a meal? Yes _________ No _________

Reflect on your responses:

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Stress

Many aspects of life can cause stress—work or school deadlines, moving, separation or divorce, a health crisis for yourself or a family member, or the death of someone close—and stress can have a serious impact on your eating and your health. List some of the stressors in your life:

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Consider ways in which you might be able to manage your stress. There are many ways to do this, including getting emotional support from a friend (or a professional), getting physical help (especially in moving), and practicing techniques to overcome procrastinating habits.

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The previous exercises helped you identify some factors that may be the source of your overeating. Looking at your life fully and finding the problems that may be affecting your eating—and their solutions—is essential for moving forward in your quest to attune to your body’s signals of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction in eating. Without this examination of your life, you may be making the wrong assumption that your eating is purely emotionally based.

Evaluating Your Deprivation Quotient: Stealth Deprivation

Although you have committed to rejecting the diet mentality and making peace with food, you may not be fully healed, which means you may be suffering from what we call stealth deprivation. When you are stealth deprived, the habits and patterns of the diet mentality are still rooted in the back of your mind, even though you have tried to eradicate them. The following questions will explore this possibility.

Have you made complete peace with food?

Do you really believe that all foods are emotionally equivalent? Yes ________ No ________
Are you able to think about foods without labeling them as good or bad? Yes _________ No _________
Are you able to eat foods that you truly enjoy at any time, without putting special conditions on them? For example, you don’t consider them a treat that should be enjoyed only when you are on vacation or at a wedding. Yes _________ No _________

Do you have food security?

Do you buy food often enough, so you have a variety of choices and a plentiful amount of food at home? Yes _________ No ________
Do you have free access to food, rather than it being controlled by someone else, like a family member? Yes _________ No ________

Are any other factors affecting you?

At social gatherings, have you stopped eating according to the expectations of others rather than eating what you really want? Yes _________ No ________
Have you stopped eating with judgmental people in your life, who inhibit your food choices? Yes ________ No ________

If you answered no to any of these questions, you may still be living with self-imposed food restriction. Feeling deprived of food (either in the variety or in the amount of food) puts you at risk for overeating, and overeating, of course, often initiates a vicious cycle: food restriction as compensation, rebounding in more overeating, and so forth.

If you are still struggling with the automatic thought that some foods are good or bad, remember that this is a cognitive distortion that has been reinforced by years of diet mentality and by our culture. Use the skills you practiced in chapter 3 (on making peace with food) and in chapter 4 (on challenging the food police) to replace this thought with one that helps you to extinguish this old belief and to replace it with the Intuitive Eating premise that all foods are equal and allowed.

What do you need to do to repair or practice working on these issues?

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If you have discovered that some of your disconnected eating is associated with issues of self-care or deprivation from a lingering dieting mentality, there is more work to be done in these areas. Remember, it takes patience and practice. It is best to address these issues before trying to tackle any problems you have with emotional eating. It’s much easier to navigate the ups and downs in life when your self-care is in place and the dieting mentality is behind you. The rest of this chapter explores emotional eating and ways to practice new skills for healthier coping mechanisms.

Emotional Reasons for Overeating

It is important to remember that eating does not occur in a void. Much of the time, food has emotional associations. We often forget how deeply food is tied to the need for comfort and safety. This all begins at birth. Soon after a baby is born, he or she is offered milk. That first taste of milk may set the stage for associating pleasure and comfort with a stressful situation. This association deepens when food is offered to soothe aches, celebrate events, and show love—when food becomes a comfort, a reward, and a reliable friend.

Emotional eating covers a wide spectrum of emotions. It can be as positive as pleasure when eating a slice of wedding cake or as destructive as eating to numb difficult feelings or even to punish yourself as a result of negative self-talk.

Evaluating the Pros and Cons of Emotional Eating

It is important to acknowledge how emotional eating has served you. This is the first step toward healing the negative feelings you have about yourself in relation to eating. If you appreciate that you were actually trying to take care of yourself by using or restricting food, when you knew no other way, it will help you to mourn the loss of the behavior as you give it up. And at the same time, it will help you to develop a sense of compassion for your struggle.

Let’s begin by exploring how you might have used eating as a coping mechanism. Make a list of recent times when you ate too much or too little or when you ate for any reason disconnected from hunger.

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The pros of emotional eating. List the possible ways in which emotional eating has benefitted you, such as offering you comfort, distraction, or a respite from feelings.

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The cons of emotional eating. List the ways in which emotional eating has negatively affected your life, such as isolation, physical discomfort, and numbing of positive feelings. (Be sure to approach this list with a nonjudgmental viewpoint. Most people think they’ve done something wrong when they’ve used or restricted food to cope with their feelings. Actually, they’ve only done the best that they could at the time. They’ve simply grasped for the most accessible coping mechanism they could find—food.)

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Do the cons of your eating outweigh the pros? If so, discuss how this is.

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If your cons have outweighed your pros, you may be ready to learn to let go of your emotional eating and to find the peace and freedom that comes as you heal.

Identify Emotional Triggers

There are many emotional triggers for eating, and it’s likely that most people eat emotionally from time to time:

anxiety—using food to calm yourself
boredom—eating as something to do
bribery—“finish your homework, and you can have a treat”
celebration—food accompanies most events
emptiness—eating from a lack of spiritual meaning
excitement—using food as something fun
feeling lonely or unloved—using food as a friend
frustration, anger, rage—eating as a release
loosening the reins—eating as an outlet from a self-imposed militaristic or perfectionist life
mild depression—carbohydrates can increase serotonin—the “feel better” neuro- transmitter
self-soothing when upset—eating as a comforting or consoling activity
procrastination—“I’ll do that task after I eat something”
reward—“I just closed that deal—now I deserve that big piece of chocolate cake”
stress—food for relief

It is also possible that feelings of rebellion can trigger overeating or your food choices. This can happen as a result of reacting to someone in your life. In chapter 4, Challenge the Food Police, you learned that when approached by someone acting like a critical parent, it is common for you to respond like a rebellious child.

List any triggers of emotional eating for you:

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Describe some examples of when and how these emotional triggers acted on you:

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Become Aware of Your Range of Feelings

Many people are accustomed to avoiding feelings or denying that they have them. To explore the range of the feelings you have, examine the table below, which lists seven core emotions, along with their subsets. These can all be affecting your eating.

Recall that every emotion has a physical sensation; knowing this is a component of interoceptive awareness. For each of the emotions in the table above, imagine the last time you felt that emotion and reflect upon where in your body you experienced a physical sensation. Part of getting to know your emotional feelings is familiarizing yourself with how these feelings are experienced in your body. The exercise that follows is designed to help increase your awareness of the physical sensations that arise from your emotions. Recalling the emotions from the table above, the next time you are experiencing a strong emotional feeling, write it in one of the spaces in the left-hand column. Pay attention to where it is located in your body, and place an X in the appropriate column or columns to the right. For the last three columns on the right, reflect on the overall body experience—was it pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? Repeat this exercise for one or two other top emotions, when you experience them. Getting familiar with how emotions feel physically in your body can be the first step in learning to tolerate your feelings.

Getting to Know Your Body—The Physical Sensations of Emotions

The preceding exercise can be copied or downloaded from the book’s website for future use, so you can do it again and again, to help you become more adept at body awareness. Use the following worksheet to assess ways in which you cope with your feelings and how you feel about your life. Put a check by the statements that apply to you. The more checkmarks on this page, the more likely you’re using food to cope with your life.

Reflection

Review your responses—as a whole, what trend or trends do your responses reflect?

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In the next section, you will learn and practice new ways to cope with your emotions, which will help you create a healthier relationship with food.

Healing Emotional Eating

There are three main paths to learning to cope with your feelings without using food:

Self-Care, Nurturance, and Compassion

Learning to Sit with Your Feelings

Helpful Distraction

Self-Care, Nurturance, and Compassion

Self-care, nurturance, and compassion are fundamental to being able to cope with your emotions without using food—they must be established before moving on. They require a belief that not only do you have emotional needs but also that your needs are important and that you have a right to have them met. Without this belief, and without cultivating self-care, nurturance, and compassion, you are likely to continue or return to using food—your original source of comfort and nurturance.

There are many basic human needs that people often deny, but they are essential for self-care:

enough sleep and rest

sensual pleasure

expression of feelings, in order to be heard, understood, and accepted

intellectual and creative stimulation

comfort and warmth

Do you often take care of others’ needs while negating yours? How does that make you feel—perhaps frustrated, resentful, or exhausted?

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Self-nurturance goes beyond the basics of self-care. It’s being extra nice to yourself. How often (seldom, occasionally, or regularly) do you allow time for experiences that provide self-nurturance, such as the following?

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asking for hugs

playing with pets

listening to some soothing or enjoyable music

reading a book for pleasure

taking a walk in nature

looking at a sunset

buying yourself flowers or another small gift

getting a massage

bubble baths, sauna, or steam

meditating

List your nurturing activities. Be sure to include a couple that don’t require money.

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Do you crave more nurturance in your life? Think about your typical day, as well as your life in general. Is there time in your life for nurturing activities, or are you overscheduled? List some experiences that you would find nurturing that you don’t do now but would like to do.

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Having compassion for yourself in this journey is essential. In chapter 4, Challenge the Food Police, we discussed how Intuitive Eating is best thought of as a spiral of healing, with the motto “Come from a place of curiosity, not judgment!” The image of spiral movement reminds you that you should not expect progress to move in a straight line. You will sometimes experience a return to earlier types of behavior, but you should not consider these to be setbacks. When your forward progress loops around into one of these old patterns, look at that movement with curiosity. Use these loops—with their returns to old behavior—to reexamine your beliefs and self-talk and to look again at what you need for self-care. Having an outlook of self-compassion is an essential part of this path to healing emotional eating. When you practice self-care, feel nurtured in the ways that are unique to your life, and speak to yourself with compassion, you will find that eating may no longer serve as your primary source of nurturance. It will become just a way to meet your hunger needs, while providing you pleasure and satisfaction.

Using Your Imagination

Along with the types of self-nurturance listed above, you can create a nurturing experience at any moment by imagining a location where you have felt completely calm. This might be at the beach or hiking on a beautiful mountain path. Maybe you’re sitting on your couch, wrapped in a soft blanket and listening to music. Or maybe you’re at a theater, watching a play or movie.

As you imagine this, ask yourself the following questions: How are you feeling? Are your tense muscles relaxing? Have your racing thoughts slowed down?

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Practice imagining yourself in this wonderful, peaceful place. Once you are adept at calling up the image and the warm, relaxing feelings, you will be able to employ them whenever you need them—especially in a moment when you’re feeling desperate for food but not hungry.

Learning to Sit with Your Feelings

For some people, it can be an overwhelming task to figure out what you’re feeling when you aren’t hungry, yet you want to eat, or when you are in the middle of a meal and have had enough to satisfy your physical hunger, but you want to eat more of the delicious food. For some people, however, this situation can be a challenge that offers them a window into their inner world.

Taking a Time-Out: What Am I Feeling Right Now?

One of the keys to becoming an Intuitive Eater is being willing to take the time to try to figure out your emotional triggers, so that eating is connected to hunger and satisfaction rather than your feelings. It’s important to pause—to take a time-out—to tune in to these feelings. Even if you eventually choose to eat when you’re not hungry or to continue to eat when you’re full, a five-minute time-out changes a distracted eating experience into one that is mindful.

Do the following exercise when you find that you are not physically hungry but still want to eat. Before you put any food (or any more food) in your mouth, set a timer for five minutes. Find a comfortable position—sitting or lying down—in a quiet place, without distraction. Explore any of the feelings or emotional triggers you are experiencing that might be causing your desire to eat. What are you feeling right now?

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What Is It That I Really Need at This Moment?

When the timer goes off, take a moment to ponder if you still have the desire to eat. If your answer is yes, ask yourself, What do I need—at this moment—to deal with my current feelings? Since your body isn’t hungry, you don’t need food. Just notice the answer when it arises. Don’t judge it or determine that you can’t have what you really need. The answer may come as a storyline: I need my partner to spend more time with me, or I need to speak to my best friend more often, or I need some quiet time for myself.

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If your answer came as a storyline, think about the need behind it. Perhaps it is the feeling of connection, the feeling of being nurtured, a sense of spaciousness, or a sense of pleasure and enjoyment.

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The next question to ask is How can I fulfill this need and this feeling without turning to food? There are many possible answers to this question:

If you need to feel connection, you might speak up and ask for more time with your partner, or you might schedule some time with friends or family.

If you need nurturing, you might engage in activities that nurture you, such as painting, hiking, a nap, yoga, or writing in your journal.

If you seek pleasure and entertainment, you might plan to go to a movie, play, or concert.

If you need some time alone, you might decide to stay home for the evening to watch your favorite television show instead of going out.

What will work for you?

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Repeat this time-out practice regularly to explore these two essential questions: What am I feeling? and What do I really need? This will be one of your most valuable tools.

Building Your Emotional Muscles

If your desire to eat continues to be overwhelming, and you choose to eat, feel free to do so, but be sure to do so without judgment. Don’t think that choosing to eat after the time-out exercise is a setback. You are still making progress. The time-out exercise itself is a step forward. Your decision to eat after it is part of the learning process. In the past, you went directly to food the moment an uncomfortable feeling emerged. With this practice, you give yourself the opportunity to identify your feelings and allow yourself to live with them, if only for a few moments, rather than using food to immediately push them away.

Remember, it’s important to come from a place of curiosity, not judgment. Be curious about your needs and feelings; don’t judge your behaviors. Have patience with this process. Any new behavior takes time to develop and set in. If you end up eating to a point of feeling uncomfortable, be gentle with yourself. Just as the emotions will diminish, so will the physical discomfort. Remember that your body will need food when your hunger returns. Honor your hunger and your body, and feed yourself in a way that is satisfying.

As you continue to do these practices, your emotional muscles will grow; you will be able to stay with your feelings for longer periods of time, and, eventually, your need to turn to food when you’re not hungry will diminish and disappear.

Note: If your feelings are extremely intense and feel unbearable to you, consider contacting a psychotherapist for a consultation, or if you are already in therapy, connect with your therapist or set up an extra appointment. Some psychotherapists or nutrition therapists allow you to contact them via e-mail when you’re in distress. They might not always be able to respond immediately to such emails, but sharing your feelings, and knowing a response will be coming, can be comforting.

The Sadness of Saying Enough

As you continue practicing taking a time-out, you’ll become more adept at being able to wait until you are hungry again to have something else to eat—or to stop eating when you’re satisfied and comfortably full. But don’t be surprised if sadness emerges when you choose not to eat at these times. It’s common to feel sad when you have to set a limit to any enjoyable experience. If you allow yourself to experience the sadness, it will pass in just a few moments—especially if you remember that you can eat whatever you wish when your hunger reemerges. If you spend time with this feeling of sadness and acknowledge it, it won’t hold power over you.

The following practice is designed to help you when you find that you want to continue eating even though you know that you’re comfortably full. You may not be triggered to want to eat more by some deep emotion. It just might be that the food is particularly delicious or that you’re simply enjoying the time away from your ordinary tasks. It may feel difficult to stop and set a limit to the amount you’re eating, but if this practice is done regularly, it will be part of your emotional growth.

As you notice that you’re comfortably full, ask the following questions:

Has this been a satisfying meal, both physically and in regard to taste?

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Do I wish to feel physically comfortable—not overly full?

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Am I feeling sad that the meal is now over and I need to stop?

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Now do the following:

For a few moments, sit with the feeling of sadness, as well as with the appreciation you have for the delicious meal.

Take a few deep breaths.

Now remove yourself from the table. Take the plate to the sink, if you’re at home. If you’re in a restaurant, ask for a doggie bag (if the food is portable and you like leftovers).

If you’re at home, go into another room and engage in some other activity.

Note how soon the feeling of sadness begins to dissipate.

When you do this practice regularly, you will find a deepened level of contentment in your eating and an increase in your self-esteem, knowing that you can tolerate these feelings of sadness while at the same time appreciating your increasing reconnection with your internal Intuitive Eater.

The “One Little Thing” Approach

One of the most powerful triggers to overeating is the feeling of being overwhelmed and anxious when life’s demands seem to multiply exponentially. There are the demands of work or school, e-mails to answer, phone calls to make, papers to file, as well as bills, household chores, and all of the commitments of your personal life. The best coping mechanism when this occurs is to commit to picking just one task to do in the moment, while letting go of the worry about everything else. Pick just one paper to file or one article to read or one phone call to return. When this one task is finished, you can pick the next.

Do this exercise when you’re feeling overwhelmed. Do you feel less anxious? Does it reduce your desire to eat in order to push away the anxiety?

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By doing these practices regularly, you will find that the activities you choose will give you more fulfillment and physical and mental well-being than the unnecessary food would have provided.

Helpful Distraction

You might find it odd to see the word distraction in the context of learning to cope with your feelings without using food. You’ve seen that learning to nurture yourself is a prerequisite to being able to have the strength and fortitude to manage the difficult feelings you encounter in your life’s journey. You’ve also practiced the skills of sitting with your feelings as you develop your emotional muscles. So why should we ever consider distraction as an option? The answer is that we need to be practical and realistic. Sometimes we simply just need a respite from the pain. We need to find a nondestructive activity that can give us an alternative to difficult feelings and that might give us some satisfaction, joy, laughter, or a way to rest. Just as you need to have rest days from physical exercise so your sore muscles can heal, sometimes you may need to have a time-out from your emotions so that your emotional muscles can heal.

There are many activities that can offer distraction when you need it, including

going to a movie or watching one at home;

putting on some music and dancing;

working on a crossword or jigsaw puzzle, or Sudoku;

reading an absorbing book;

flipping through the pages in a magazine; and

playing a game on the computer.

Give yourself permission to not be with your feelings and to pick an activity in which to immerse yourself. What activities might you enjoy when you just can’t feel anymore?

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In this section, you have explored three paths toward healing emotional eating:

self-care, nurturance, and compassion

learning to sit with your feelings

helpful distraction

Remember that food has helped you cope with life’s challenges when you knew no other way to cope. By practicing the exercises in this section, you will find that you are developing and strengthening new coping mechanisms, which will free you to put food in its proper place—for nourishment and satisfaction, rather than for dealing with feelings. Remember to be gentle and compassionate with yourself for having developed your previous coping mechanism of using food. It was the best you could do at the time!

Prevention

Up to this point, you have been dealing with triggers to emotional eating. Now, let’s explore ways to help lower your risk of emotional eating during vulnerable times, such as potentially stressful social interactions. This will keep you from being caught off guard.

Preparation

Let’s say that you are about to attend a stressful event. It might be a family wedding, a party, an office event, or a vacation with friends. You may start to feel the anticipatory anxiety that typically arises when you’re with certain people, especially family. In fact, this anxiety may have been the original trigger that caused you to start using food to calm yourself as a child. There are many ways you can proactively prepare for this kind of stressful gathering.

If you will be out of town:

Consider staying at a hotel, rather than with family, to give you some built-in boundaries and space.

If you’re staying in someone’s home, ask if it’s okay for you to bring some foods you like. Don’t worry about being judged. Many people have allergies or food sensitivities—your host will likely understand. Or you might want to bring some nonperishable foods, such as nuts or dried fruit, which you could keep in your room without asking at all.

Bring your walking shoes, so that you can take a break from the gathering and go out for a walk.

Bring a journal (digital or paper), so you can write about your feelings.

Put a yoga app on your phone or tablet, so that you can experience the calming effects of yoga while you’re away.

There are a few additional strategies that will help whether you’re away or in town at an event:

Ask a close friend—or your therapist or nutritionist—if you can contact him or her if you’re beginning to feel difficult emotions. You might not even need to speak to the person. Just knowing that you can leave a message or text might be calming enough.

Find some safe people, wherever you are, who might be able to comfort you.

Be sure to take moments for regular deep breathing.

Practice speaking up in order to get your needs met, and practice setting boundaries with people who might make uncomfortable demands upon you.

Plan an exit strategy, just in case things get too stressful or you simply need some space. For example, you might say that something has come up at work and that you have to leave.

Choose a few potential stressful situations where there may be a risk of emotional eating. List them here:

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List the strategies you might use for each of these situations:

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Rehearsal and Visualization

When you visualize a future action or behavior that you would like to accomplish, you focus your mental energy on this task. In this act of focusing, you are actually creating stronger neural networks and altering your brain growth. Athletes regularly practice visualizing making that basket or kicking a field goal in order to increase performance. Likewise, this technique can be utilized to work with eating challenges. You can rehearse an upcoming event by visualizing it. For this exercise, try using one of the stressful situations you listed above.

Imagine being in the situation that is causing you to worry. Visualize that it’s time for the food to be served. When you have a clear image of this event, answer the following questions:

Which emotions and physical sensations might you expect to feel? What challenges might trigger your urge to overeat or restrict? Perhaps a conversation with a family member? Maybe feeling stressed from traveling? Perhaps excessive downtime, without any activities?

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When you visualize the dining part of the event, what feelings might you experience?

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If these feelings seem difficult to manage, what strategies might you use to avoid overeating or restricting?

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What would it feel like to eat excessively or restrict?

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Now, imagine what it might be like to stay true to your body’s signals and eat only for hunger. If you did not push down your feelings with excess food or by restricting, might you be in emotional distress? What could you do to comfort yourself?

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What positive feelings might arise as a result of your ability to cope with this stressful event without using or restricting food?

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You may have eaten emotionally for many years to numb feelings that were difficult to bear. Just as you wouldn’t expect to be able to run a marathon if you’ve been sedentary for a long time, it would be unreasonable for you to expect to be able to readily tolerate difficult feelings in these types of situations right away. Remember, just as you must build physical muscles to become an athlete, you must develop your emotional muscles to be able to tolerate feelings.

Wrap-Up

The tendency to eat emotionally could provide you with a strange gift. Any time that you find that you’re craving food when you’re not hungry (or wanting to restrict eating when your body needs nourishment)—stop for a moment to appreciate that this urge is actually a voice from within. It’s letting you know that there is an emotion or a need that requires your attention. Contemplate what this might be and tap into that well of wisdom from within—you will find the appropriate fit for this emotion or need.

By continuing to practice the exercises in this chapter, it will become easier to identify and examine your triggers and your emotions related to eating. You will have a growing toolbox of helpful techniques. With regular practice, you will discover that your life experience expands exponentially, so that food takes its proper place—as a source of nourishment and one of life’s simple pleasures.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to honor your body by practicing techniques that reflect appreciation and respect.