It is actually way more common than you may think. Up to 50% of the population has an unhealthy relationship with food, their body, and/or exercise. As a National Board-Certified Health & Wellness Coach, I help women find peace with food, even when it feels impossible. I partner with my clients in a thought-provoking and creative process of self-discovery that inspires and supports them to create a healthier relationship with food and their body.
Essentially, when we eat emotionally, we are disconnecting from our bodies by not listening to them. We ignore the body’s signals for hunger by either eating when we’re not hungry or not eating when we are hungry. In turn, we become disconnected from our body’s true hunger signals.
Emotional eating is complicated, and it’s different for everybody. Being able to recognize, understand, regulate, and express your emotions will help you begin to make sense of why you’re eating for reasons beyond physical hunger.
Here is the thing… we ALL eat emotionally sometimes. We use food to celebrate, as a pick-me-up, etc. It is perfectly normal and acceptable! The problem is when we feel guilty, ashamed, and out of control around it. When this happens, it can become all consuming and will interfere with our quality of life.
Our habits play a huge role in emotional eating. These habits include what we eat, how we eat, and when we eat. We all know that our eating habits can be hard to break, especially when we have been eating this way for a long time. And when you add emotions into the mix, it can make eating habits especially difficult to break!
This is where I come in as a health coach. A National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach, NBHC-HWC, is someone who is trained in behavior change theories, motivational strategies, and health education and promotion theories. Using these tools, I help my clients build the foundation for a healthier relationship with food.
My coaching is informed by a principle of bio-individuality. Everyone has a unique experience, and there’s no one-size-fits-all cookie cutter approach when it comes to shifting behaviors such as emotional eating. Food and eating mean different things to different people. Emotional eating is driven based on a variety of factors such as our personal experiences and associations, cultural norms, social influences, personal coping strategies, and the ability to regulate emotions.
Through the coaching process, we will navigate this journey of change together as you discover your own answers and create your own possibilities to what is possible. The goal of coaching is to encourage personal responsibility, reflective thinking, self-discovery, and self-efficacy. This is accomplished through the use of a collaborative rather than a prescriptive approach.
When you have struggled with food and weight for years, you tend thoughts tend to be focused on what you don’t want. And yet when we focus on what we don’t want, we create more of that.
release conditioned patterns of thinking and old limitations—freeing you to experience higher awareness and a more powerful sense of your true self.