We Think Food is Love, But it Isn’t!
Overeating isn’t real self-care and doesn’t stem from self-love. It is the result of a lack of self-love and self-care.
It warrants so much compassion, when children grasp onto overeating at a young age in a frantic attempt to feel better.
We don't know how to cope with how we feel and what is going on around us, and there are pressures from everywhere to deny that truth and suppress our feelings.
It is easy to see why children turn to overeating as an attempt to care for themselves.
It is easy to see why children use food to to cope and emotionally survive in a situation they are not psychologically equipped to properly process.
Even years later when we become adults, compulsive eating can feel at times like the caring or compassionate thing to do.
We want the relief, safety or comfort that we perceive it brings us.
We are still living in the childhood frenzy every time those feelings get triggered again, and we are still in judgment, fear and denial of those emotions.
However we must understand that now it is time to sort through our associations with self-care and self-love, because we often have things a bit backward.
Again, compassion is warranted: of course we have it backward, look at what happened in our childhoods.
But the truth is, avoiding our feelings with food as adults now is actually not true self-love or care.
Feeling our emotions - even the painful, uncomfortable and explosive ones - is self-love and self-care.
We need to work emotionally through these issues so we can understand and start to feel in our soul that true self-care and self-love is about feeling rather than numbing.
In this place, overeating actually starts to feel like a harsh way to deal with ourselves and our feelings, not like a kind and understanding way to deal with our feelings.
Consider your understandable childhood associations and beliefs around food, self-care, and self-love.
True self-love will always result in balanced eating habits.
Photo by Kristaps Ungurs via Unsplash