Learn About Your Overeating at Holidays with Family

During the holidays with your family, you can learn a great deal about your compulsive eating by tuning into yourself emotionally when you’re around them.

It’s often painful, but it is an opportunity that can bring huge amounts of insight and clarity.

Here are some things you can do:

-Breathe deeply, all the time. Relax your body, including your shoulders, jaw, neck.

-Tune in to yourself rather than out of yourself, which is what we usually do.

Here are questions you can ask yourself while you’re going through the days:

-How do I really feel with my family? (Not how society/religion tells you’re supposed to, especially around the holidays)

-What are the emotional dynamics playing out in the family? How do we treat each other?

-What emotions are being projected around the family, regardless of what is being said? What are the feelings, regardless of the words?

-What emotions are coming up in me? Can I be honest about them without judging them?

-What is my family’s relationship to emotions?

-What is the real truth about why I developed this compulsive eating?

-What emotions do I not want to feel, which come from my childhood?

Often, when we ask these questions and really want to find out more truth, though it is often painful, it is illuminating.

You may think there isn’t anything that could surprise you because you know your family so well, but when you really tune in you start to see things that you didn’t see before.

Someone makes a comment to you, or looks at you a certain way, or ignores you, or you see an interaction in the family, and you go “Oh my gosh, there it is. I never noticed it before. It just happened.”

Most of us zone out of how we’re really feeling and what’s really going on and then just overdo it with food (and alcohol). But there is another option!

Photo by Krysten Whalen via Unsplash