Worried About Overeating and the Holidays? Take a Breath.

You may be worried about overeating during the holidays. Can you slow down, take a breath, relax and come back into your body?

When we are worried about eating or weight, we often dissociate. Can you stay in your body instead?

Dissociation, or going out of the body, is a way we distance ourselves from the turmoil we're feeling.

Sometimes we revert to self-judgement, getting angry at ourselves for our compulsive eating tendencies.

These are not kind ways to treat ourselves, though they are very common.

Instead, can you try relaxing your whole body; your shoulders, your neck, your jaw, your tummy, your forehead? Can you relax and slow things down? Can you take some deep breaths?

When we are struggling with overeating it is so tempting and so automatic to emotionally abandon ourselves by either getting angry at ourselves or spiraling in anxiety about food.

I understand this cycle very well. In fact, the self-anger and the terror used to spiral me to the point where I was debilitatingly depressed.

I look back on that now and think, "Gosh that was such a harsh way to treat myself which I learned from my childhood."

We do need to do the hard work of healing our relationship with food, but we can do it with grace for ourselves. We can breathe through it, stay in our bodies through it, and, I know this sounds crazy, but we can relax through it.

Relaxing through it doesn't mean there won't be big emotions to work through -- anger (not at ourselves though; this will be childhood anger), fear, grief. But you can overall approach the whole thing with a relaxed feeling.

So this holiday season, if you're either worried about overeating, or you already have, resist the temptation to get angry at yourself or spiral. Rather, come back to yourself, your body, your breathing and back to your soul.

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