Emotional Healing: My Last Resort in Healing Food Addiction

I wasn't convinced that feeling painful emotions would do a thing to heal my overeating.

Nowadays, when I talk about accessing our suppressed emotions to heal our relationship with food, I sound quite confident about the process.

But I didn't always feel that way! And at the beginning, most of the clients I work with also do not feel convinced.

The only reason I began to try feeling hard emotions was because I had tried so many things to heal my overeating already, and I was at the end of my rope.

I was desperate to get out of the prison of overeating, and the seemingly endless cycles of binge eating, shame, self-punishment, dieting, self-sabotage and weight issues.

I can't tell you how much time and money I spent trying things that ultimately didn't work. Here is a list of just some of the things I tried, over about 7 years, to heal my overeating:

Meditation

Affirmations

"Positive thinking"

Gratitude lists

Yoga

Aromatherapy

EFT (tapping)

Brainwave entrainment

Crystals

Homeopathy

Acupressure

Ayurvedice medicine

Visualizing

Craniosacral therapy

Magnet therapy

Reiki

Qigong

... And the list goes on. I could add another 30 things to that list.

And from that list, guess what helped me heal my eating? Not a single one.

Sure, some of them appeared to have an effect for an hour or a few days, but in the end I was always back to the same old behaviors.

So eventually I felt, "What do I have to lose? I am so desperate, I'll try anything. If I need to look at childhood stuff and I need to punch pillows and cry, well, why not try?"

And lo and behold, it worked.

It was and has been the only thing that has actually healed my food addictions.

I invite you to try. You don't have to be convinced. It's ok if you're skeptical. Just try the experiment.