Grieving Your Food Addiction

You are allowed to grieve your food addiction… As long as it's not self-punishment or self-blame!

When we struggle with food addiction, we accumulate sadness about it.

We may feel sorrow that our lives feel small, that we've missed a lot of life due to low-self worth and the preoccupation of addiction.

We may feel sad that we've spent a lot of time and money trying to fix it.

We may feel really bummed out about the wrong turns we made on the journey, the remedies that didn't work and the bad advice we were given.

We might feel grief about the extra weight and the health issues that have resulted from the food addictions.

There is often an exhaustion kind of sadness.

As we dig into the true causes of food addiction, which have everything to do with emotions and childhood, we may feel sad that we were set up for this food addiction.

Sad that someone treated us in a way that caused us to feel we needed food to cope.

Sad that we were taught really wrong and damaging things about feeling emotions, which resulted in us feeling afraid of and judgmental of our emotions.

This grief is normal, valid, and a natural part of the process of healing.

In fact, when you don't allow this grief to flow, you are more likely to continue to compulsively eat. Grieving will make you feel relieved and lighter. I have had many of these cries myself.

However, an absolutely vital distinction here is that grieving what has happened is entirely and completely different than what most of have done for years, which is to be mad at or disappointed in ourselves, judgmental of ourselves, or in self-blame about our food addiction.

This is NOT the same thing.

Grieving your food addiction does not contain an ounce of self-hate or self-judgement.

Grieving is just that, it's just allowing sadness without self-blame, in the same way you might allow yourself to grieve the loss of a home destroyed in a tornado. You're not self-hating about losing your house, you're just incredibly sad about the loss.

So allow the sadness, allow the grief. Stay far away from self-blame and self-judgment.

Photo by Aaron Burden via Unsplash