Binge Eating: Let Your Tears Flow

Finally letting the dam of your sadness break and the tears flow can do wonders for your food compulsions.

If you overeat, there's a high likelihood that one of the kinds of emotions you're using food to suppress is sadness.

The only way to release sadness from your soul is to cry. To cry, to sob, to wail.

Did you know that science has proven that crying releases stress and emotional pain, and that tears flush stress hormones and other kinds of toxins from our bodies?

Repressing sadness is linked to impaired immune response, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and also anxiety and depression.

Feeling your sadness and crying does not increase your stress or your depression, it decreases it.

Crying also releases oxytocin and endorphins. Yes, you'll get up getting endorphins from feeling sad emotions!

One of the ways we keep our repressed sadness at bay is compulsive use of foods and drinks, overeating, and heavy or sugary foods.

The truth is, we all have a lot to cry about. We have things to cry about from our childhood, about our current life, and about the state of the world.

There is nothing noble or strong about holding it together and keeping the tears at bay.

It's not brave, it's not respectable, it's not mature, it's not adult.

Rather, allowing ourselves to cry is the noble, strong, and brave thing to do.

I recommend making as much space and time as you can in the privacy of your home, and with people who encourage our emotional experiences, to allow those tears to finally flow.

You may find that allowing that damn to finally break, letting go of control and feeling overwhelming sadness is precisely the thing you need to heal your next layer of the onion in healing food addiction.

“Sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that.”

-Barbara Brown Taylor

Photo by Adam Chan via Unsplash