{"id":118,"date":"2011-02-11T00:07:54","date_gmt":"2011-02-11T00:07:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/?p=118"},"modified":"2011-02-11T00:35:01","modified_gmt":"2011-02-11T00:35:01","slug":"its-escape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/its-escape\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s About Escape, Not Food"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>If you truly want to understand the nature of emotional eating, you should study Geneen Roth\u2019s best-selling book, Women, Food and God.<\/em> It is beautifully written and filled with really useful information.<\/p>\n

“I tell them [people in my retreats]that if compulsive eating is anything, it\u2019s a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard.\u00a0 When we don\u2019t want to notice what is going on.\u00a0 Compulsive eating is a way we distance ourselves from the way things are when they are not how we want them to be.\u00a0 I tell them that ending the obsession with food is all about the capacity to stay in the present moment.\u00a0 To not leave themselves.\u00a0 I tell them that they don\u2019t have to make a choice between losing weight and doing this.\u00a0 Weight loss is the easy part; anytime you truly listen to your hunger and fullness, you lost weight.\u00a0 But I also tell them that compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive.\u00a0 No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul.\u00a0 We refuse to take in what sustains us.\u00a0 We live lives of deprivation.\u00a0 And when we can\u2019t stand it any longer, we binge.\u00a0 The way we are able to accomplish all of this is by the simple act of bolting\u2014of leaving ourselves\u2014hundreds of times a day.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Apart from the lovely way that Geneen says this, she is extremely perceptive when she says that compulsive\/emotional eating is the refusal to face reality, the refusal to face anything uncomfortable or difficult.\u00a0 So emotional eating is a way to escape reality.<\/p>\n

Again Geneen describes the real issue so well:<\/p>\n

“Her [the compulsive eater] problem is not about the food she consumes.\u00a0 Her problem, though it eventually would become excess weight, is not weight.\u00a0 It\u2019s that she doesn\u2019t know\u2014no one ever taught her\u2014how to \u201cface\u201d (as she calls it) her \u201cdeficiency.\u201d\u00a0 The emptiness.\u00a0 The dissatisfaction.”<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve found over 20 distinct triggers that cause emotional eating.\u00a0 But what they all have in common is something uncomfortable that we don\u2019t want to face.\u00a0 Emotional eaters chose eating as a way to numb themselves to that discomfort.\u00a0 But as Geneen clearly points out, the real issue is not the eating, it\u2019s our unwillingness to live in the moment and face the uncomfortable.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

Solving this problem is three-fold:<\/p>\n

First, you need to de-condition eating, so it isn\u2019t what you automatically use to go unconscious, in order to numb yourself to the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings you don\u2019t want to face. Once you\u2019ve done that, you will no longer eat automatically whenever you have uncomfortable feelings you want to escape.<\/p>\n

Second, you need to eliminate the beliefs and conditionings that cause the thoughts and feelings that are so scary to you.<\/p>\n

Third, you need to discover that you have <\/strong>thoughts and feelings, but they are not who you are<\/strong>. (The \u201cWho Am I Really?\u201d Process will help you with this.) That realization will make it easier to allow yourself to experience and just \u201cbe with\u201d your negative thoughts and feelings, without needing to do anything to escape them.<\/p>\n

For more details, please see my eBook, The Secret to Ending Overeating For Good<\/em>, at http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com<\/a>.\u00a0 You also can get answers to specific questions at my office, 415-884-0552.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2011 Morty Lefkoe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you truly want to understand the nature of emotional eating, you should study Geneen Roth\u2019s best-selling book, Women, Food and God. It is beautifully written and filled with really useful information. “I tell them [people in my retreats]that if compulsive eating is anything, it\u2019s a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard.\u00a0 When … Continue reading “It\u2019s About Escape, Not Food”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,26,3,8,25,6,7],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122,"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions\/122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/emotionaleatingreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}