Can Healthy Eating Help with Your Emotions?

Can healthy eating help with accessing emotions? Can accessing emotions help with healing eating?

Yes!

Both of these statements are true.

When you eat a healthy, light, unprocessed plant-based diet, it is easier to get into repressed emotions. Your body won't be gummed up and toxic and you'll feel more sensitive to your feelings.

A heavy, processed diet with animal products and stimulants numbs us out to emotion and will have the effect of emotional disconnection.

So if you're wanting to connect with yourself emotionally and do personal growth work or spiritual growth work, good nutrition can really help with this process.

This is why juice cleanses can be helpful; because they can help you become more sensitive to your true feelings.

On the other hand, often we have a hard time sticking to good nutrition because being more sensitive to what's there emotionally is exactly what we haven't wanted.

Due to the desire to suppress and deny emotions, we are drawn to using heavy foods and stimulants. We then find it really hard to consistently eat healthy.

And so the way out of that cycle is to go ahead and be willing to feel your suppressed emotions so you stop wanting to use food and drinks compulsively.

So what I tell clients is this: do both!

Good nutrition can help you access repressed emotions, and accessing repressed emotions can help you choose good nutrition. It works both ways!

Focus on both nutritional changes and also feeling your emotions. They benefit each other and can create momentum when you do both.

This is why as a coach, I've continued to focus on both nutrition and deep emotional work -- because I believe both are needed for healing the body and soul, and that they can support one another.

For instance, focus on learning how to make yummy salads and on reducing your caffeine intake, but at the same time, also explore your fear and judgement of emotions and take steps to allow yourself to feel your feelings.

If you only focus on nutrition and make no effort to feel your feelings, then you won't be able to sustain good nutrition anyway. If you focus on emotions but are always having heavy foods and sugar and caffeine, you're going to find it hard to be sensitive enough to get to a lot of the deeper emotions.

It's not one or the other: it's both.

Photo by Aubrey Odom Mabey via Unsplash