Emotional Eating: An Update

It’s been a few months since I wrote about this process of mine. I’m in an interesting place. I’m eating more out of hunger than I have ever before, but I am still using food compulsively and emotionally pretty often.

I’m finding myself becoming tiresome of using food and finding it doesn’t play the roles it used to as adequately. The thought and attraction to eat generally gives way to a bit of a melancholy realization that just having eaten really didn’t do much for me. I find myself wondering, ‘Well, what was the point of that?’ This is odd for me because historically food has had major power in my life to change how I’m feeling.

This more consistent, less dramatic relationship with food has made me aware of a certain space, a certain open, objective awareness that simply doesn’t get caught up in the tunnel vision of emotional eating. Most spiritual traditions and teachers will say the space of objective, peaceful awareness is our natural state of being, but I am not yet used to it, even this amount of it. It sometimes feels very odd to me; I have been used to a certain mental and emotional drama about the times when I eat emotionally.

It is a time of acclamation for me as I feel this shift, which feels like something that has naturally happened, not something I have made happen. There are days where I eat quite compulsively and food is very interesting to me, and other days where food seems so unimportant to me I don’t even bother even when I am hungry and end up barely eating. When I am quite busy I often forget to eat, but that’s not really dealing with the issue.

I also have a growing sense of responsibility and protection for my body. I am feeling a lowering tolerance for what I currently feel like is dishonoring to my body – overburdening it with more food than it is asking for. At the same time, feelings are valid and for many of us, sometimes food is simply the best way we know to take care of ourselves. The lessons in balance and equilibrium abound 

To the always-present space,
Courtney