Are you emotionally fed?

Prefer to listen?

Prefer to read?

Hello there gorgeous lady, Rachel here with a question, do you think that right now you are emotionally fed?

Interesting question isn’t it and possibly one you’ve never asked yourself before.

Now if you are here, there is a good chance that you have some kind of food struggle. It could be emotional eating, binging , weight and food obsession, and you believe in your heart that the answer to it all is in a diet, dropping 10lbs or 2 dress sizes. If that is you, I invite you to just stop and breath for a moment because I want to explore this with you, from a totally different view point, especially from this question, are you emotionally fed?

So let me give you a classic example. Imagine you come home from work and you have had one of those days! Everything that could go wrong did,  you feel overwhelmed, you had an argument with your boss and you feel really wound up.  You don’t know whether to cry or scream and break something!

So what do you do? You find yourself in the kitchen routing through the cupboards until you find a packet of biscuits and you just start to eat them.  You don’t sit down, you don’t get a plate, you are just eating them standing up, numbing out of what’s going on and stuffing it all down with the biscuits.

How familiar does that sound to you?!

We’ve all done this, I did for 14 years, so you aren’t alone.

Now here is where the question comes in, are you emotionally fed?

In that moment you aren’t, as the problem that we often find ourselves in is we have these emotions which need to be fed in some way, they need to be acknowledged and felt and allowed to pass through us in order to be released, let go and healed.

Yet we don’t do that do we? We ignore, deflect, stuff it down, turn away from them and pretend they aren’t there.

So how do we do that then?

If you feel overwhelmed, stressed, upset, angry, frustrated or lonely, how are you feeding and feeling those emotions? How are you getting that emotional satisfaction which your body and soul really need?

If you are turning to food, or anything else such as alcohol, cigarettes, scrolling aimlessly through social media, then you aren’t actually feeling your emotions in the way that they are wanting to be felt, fed and acknowledged.

This is now about becoming an emotionally fed and soul fed women.

So let me give you some suggestions as what you can start doing, as if you struggle with emotional eating in particular, then you aren’t emotionally fed as you are ignoring or deflecting away from those emotions.

#1 Acknowledge how you feel

It could be anything; angry, upset, frustrated, lonely, sad, resentful, whatever it might be, in that moment acknowledge how you feel.

You don’t need to justify how you freel, you don’t owe anyone or yourself an explanation as to why you feel the way you do.

So own it and give it the acknowledgement which it is craving.

It’s incredbile how many women don’t own how they feel and they defuse it (often in fear of judgement or upsetting others)

Have you ever caught yourself saying ‘Oh no I’m ok, everything is OK’ when on the inside you are really angry and upset, as someone has said something or done something which wasn’t ok??

Instead you choose to suppress that emotion and swallow it, possibly with a piece of cake at the same time(!),  so really acknowledge how you feel from now on.

#2 If you can, sit with the emotion

Instead of pretending it isn’t there or pushing it away, what if you were to sit with that feeling? Sit with the anger, the fear, worry, what would happen?

Now the chances are that you might need to sit with that to find out because often we have this perception that if we have these really uncomfortable feelings, should we sit with them, the entire world will fall apart and that’s simply not true.

Yet at the same time that perception can really prevent us from even trying.

I encourage you to do that though, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, as those emotions are needing your attention in order to be passed through your system, to be released and processed.

If we put the barriers up so we don’t even go there, they will get bigger and bigger and possibly manifest into something else.

(my suppression of chronic anxiety ended up turning into panic attacks, which were truly far more uncomfortable than the initial anxiety in the first place. My body wanted to get my attention and indeed she did)

#3 Taking steps to becoming a soul fed women

This is truly a work in progress. There is no quick fix and no magic solution. It starts with you being truthful with yourself and to yourself.

If there are certain emotions which seem to be there quite often for you (anger is a common one which is suppressed amongst women, but it could be anything), once you acknowledge it’s there, it’s then your choice to do something with that.

Using resources which are available to you, journalling, meditating, talking, reflecting on it and really starting to understand who you are and what’s going on with your life because if you are not emotionally fed, you will find yourself going around in a cycle, usually involving crisps, chocolate and biscuits and blaming yourself for what you’re doing.

Yet the reality is in that moment you are turning to food as a way of emotionally feeding yourself but you know on a deep soul level, that chocolate is not the answer, it isn’t what your soul is truly hungry for.

It will never change or address how you truly feel, so we need to start taking food out of the equation, so you can start to truly embody becoming an emotionally fed and soul fed women (who doesn’t need chocolate whenever her emotions appear)

Want some extra help with addressing emotional eating?

I’ve created a free training series on ‘How To Stop Emotional Eating’ just for you, which contains 4 videos to show you how to heal your relationship with food and yourself.

To get started, head over to: http://www.rachelfoy.com/emotionaleatinghelp

Missed last week’s post? You can see it here: Is food your only pleasure?