Guilty Eating
According to an article in The Observer, a study undertaken by New Atkins Nutritional found in a study of 2,000 women across the UK that a large percentage of those polled had an uneasy relationship with food. This manifested most often as eating in secret and binge eating. The research also found that women under 25 have food on their minds twice as much as those over 55, that many women felt guilty about how much they ate and that overeating was most often triggered by boredom, stress and depression.
These findings do not surprise me. It means though that many women are expending a vast amount of energy thinking about food, trying not to indulge, thinking about their weight and berating themselves for how they eat and/or look.
Most of us have an uneasy relationship with our feelings, especially those that cause us to feel uncomfortable. We may have been encouraged as children to suppress certain kinds of feelings, or may have been given food as a pacifier by a harried parent or a parent who didn’t know what else to do when we were upset. The days when we had to forage for food just to exist, are long gone. For most of us, at least in the West, food is readily available. We just have to go to a cupboard or the fridge where a smorgasbord of food probably awaits us - along with almost instant comfort.
As hypnotherapists, we often refer to states such as boredom, stress and depression as “trance” states; that is states where the focus of our attention is narrowed down. This means that we are mostly only aware of the feeling we have labelled as uncomfortable or unwanted. It also means that access to the inner resources that could help us move out of that state, are out of reach. Interesting, isn’t it. When you are upset and you habitually turn to food to “relieve” it, doesn’t that feeling seem to be all-consuming, filling the whole of your awareness, until you eat the food?
It is quite normal human behaviour to try and help ourselves and to have done so in a way that is really not a good option in the long run. And it is true that most of our behaviours that we now find unhelpful had their genesis in childhood. The trouble is that the choice we made “worked” then and so we adopted it by repeating it over and over again in the same situation and it became automatic. The feeling became linked with food.
Of course, we use labels to describe how we feel; bored, stressed, depressed. But what are those feelings really. Is my bored the same as your bored? Hypnotherapy can help us really see what that feeling is that we have labelled in a particular way in all its facets and nuances. Then we can really see what we need to work with. This also allows you to fully acknowledge a part of you that has been trying to express itself and needs to be acknowledged with compassion as a part of yourself, rather than stuffed back down with food only to arise again. Then we can reach in and make the changes you want based on this greater understanding and clarity.
If we need to go back in time to have a look at what was going on when the eating behaviour began, we can do so. Reviewing something from the adult perspective can initiate the changes we want to make.
And so importantly, we can tap into the inner resources you have to make resorting to food to feel better a thing of the past and free up that energy expended on eating matters. No wonder women feel more balanced, whole and light when they change unwanted eating habits.
The article quotes nutritionist Linda O’Byrne as advising women to “stamp out” their unhealthy approaches to food and eating. She is right in saying that food should not be the enemy but rather a positive factor in life. Eating habits need to be understood so that you can naturally return to the attitude to food you were born with where you only ate when you were hungry and knew when you had had enough. No “stamping out” is necessary with hypnotherapy.