One of the challenges of an “inside out” approach to healing overeating is that it’s often hard to see how inner work leads to outer change. One of the reasons why we love diets is that they give us a very concrete plan with tangible results. Do A, and expect B. We can see, “Oh, if I cut my calories my butt gets smaller. Wahoo!” Sign me up.
So I’m going to explain how my inside out approach to healing food addiction, bingeing, and overeating also works to make your butt smaller. Hee hee. But all joking aside, more importantly, I offer this approach because rather than just treating the symptoms (the extra weight and the overeating) I want to help you heal the root of the problem.
I want you to feel free from the burden of worrying, “Is this something I’m just always going to deal with?” I want you to feel free to live your precious, unique life, and to do the work that you feel called to do. (It’s hard to do that with the weight of overeating dragging us down, isn’t it?) And what I most want for you – I want you to love yourself unconditionally. To befriend yourself. To be your own best friend. I want you to see – to know, to live, to feel – your goodness, wholeness, and worth.
So here’s how I see it:
Overeating doesn’t define you; it’s not who you “are” – even though I know it feels this way when you’re caught in a binge. Overeating is simply a coping mechanism. It’s a learned behavior. It’s how you made yourself feel safe when life felt scary.
This probably began when you were very young. Then you repeated the pattern. Years, days, or minutes later, when life got scary and stressful again, you felt the panic and the fear, and returned to what made you feel safe – your “friend” food.
This is how addiction is born – you kept returning to what you thought would bring relief, what had worked in the past. And yet stuffing with food doesn’t work. It causes its own suffering. And yet we continue the pattern because we hope that it will work – eventually. That eating enough food will quell the fear, anxiety, stress or pain.
I know this because I’ve been an overeater, food addict, and binge eater for over 20 years. It’s not pretty, as many of you probably know from your own experience! My work came out of my direct experience in trying to shift and heal my food “stuff.”
What finally worked for me was to stop running from all my pain and to turn towards it. Scary, I know.
It helps me to think of it in this way: Think of your overeating self as being made up of the many small, fearful, tender, vulnerable parts of you – parts of you that have unmet needs, fears, and wounding. Parts of you that want empathy and acknowledgement – to be seen, heard and understood. Parts of us that are often young, and small, and have been hurting for a looong time.
And yet because they’re hurting, and we don’t like to hurt – who does? – we avoid them. We run. We flee, and flee into FOOD.
When we run from these tender, hurt parts of ourselves, we feel anxious. We feel a constant thrum of anxiety as we stuff these feelings down. It builds and builds and builds, and the inner tension gets to a breaking point. So, we give in. Voila! We eat to soothe the anxiety. Initially, we feel better as we soothe the anxiety, even as we then feel *worse* because we’ve overeaten…again. So frustrating.
And yet none of this is our fault – if we could do better, we would. Blame only further entrenches our overeating. It’s normal, natural and completely understandable to run from pain. We’re human and we love ourselves – who wants to hurt?
Blame entrenches overeating, and so does avoiding our pain. In my experience, it’s almost as if the overeating will actively, willfully resist our “fixing” it until we look at the pain underneath and care for it. This is often under the surface, subconscious, and undetected- which is why we get so frustrated when we notice that we’re “sabotaging” ourselves. (I use that word lightly because I’ve found that it can also create a whole slew of guilt and shame – we not only blame ourselves for overeating, but also blame ourselves for causing the overeating!)
We feel like we’re in a tug of war between the part of us who wants to lose weight, heal, and have a healthy, vibrant body and the part of us that says, “I just want to eat whatever the heck I want.”
Think of a rebellious toddler saying, “You can’t make me.” Our pain can act like that – resisting our attempts to exercise, lose weight, and eat healthy foods. It’s saying, ” You can’t make me heal. You can’t make me change.”
WHY would a part of us not want to be healed? Because it feels ignored, overlooked, judged, and blamed.
I know it sounds crazy and counterintuitive – that by turning towards our pain we feel better. When we care for our deep hurts, and say, “I care about you,” when we sit with them and feel them, we drop our guns of resistance. We feel free to move forward and to support ourselves, to do all the things that we want to be doing, like eating more whole foods, or exercising, or not eating after dinner. It’s like we are gathering all the many parts of ourselves and putting them on the same “team” instead of fighting amongst themselves or having contradictory goals.
Everything wants compassion. Everything wants empathy. Everything wants to be loved. What a powerful, and beautiful practice when we give this to ourselves – to every ugly, aching, messy, needy, childish, hurting part of ourselves. It is the noblest work we can do, because it is unconditional love. It’s what every spiritual path teaches. It’s forgiving ourselves and loving ourselves with all our messy humanity. We’re telling ourselves, when the critical, shame filled voice arises, “Shhh shhh, there, there…I love ALL of me.”
We’re healing the roots of overeating, which frees us to do all the stuff “up on the surface” that we want to be doing, that leads us to the results (a thinner body, a relaxed relationship with food, regular self care, etc.) we seek.
Here’s the map:
1. Heal the roots of overeating (feel the hurts, care for them; soften the resistance by dropping blame and self judgment; lean into your experience)
which empowers feelings of…
2. Capability (I know how to do this.)
Confidence (I can do this.)
Commitment (I am willing to do this.)
which enables you to…
3. Change your behaviors, one small step at a time…exercising, eating more whole foods, having regular, structured meal times, eating less processed food or sugar, etc.
which leads to….
4. Weight loss
Regular self care
Safety (trusting yourself)
Integrity (living out your values)
which loops back and feeds #2, your capability, confidence and commitment….which feeds your ability to care for your body, heart and mind with wisdom, #3….which feeds greater feelings of safety, confidence, responsibility, esteem, love, worthiness, and trust.
This gives me goosebumps!
Eating becomes a very conscious, deliberate choice – an act of kindness, an act of joy, an act of nourishment – not something to fear. It’s something to treasure. Most importantly, life is something to treasure. Your own being is something to treasure.
What freedom.
