Adding Tools To The Toolbox

When people come to intuitive eating looking to find peace with food and eventual weight loss and the health benefits that come with weight loss they want success right now. Perfection.

They want the no diet approach to work like a diet with clear cut rules about what to eat, what not to eat, when to eat. They want to see immediate results. Unfortunately intuitive eating doesn't work like that for most people. For most people the process is a slow one.

A normal person beginning the approach may spend weeks learning what hunger feels like and getting comfortable with the sensation, learning to trust that they can wait until they are truly hungry to eat, because when they are truly hungry they will be able to eat whatever they choose, that they can stop when they are satisfied because they'll be able to again eat whatever they choose when they are again hungry. It takes a period of time for most people who have lived dieted, binged, dieted, binged, dieted and binged to really learn to trust that they can have peace and sanity with food, that they do not need to eat all the good stuff before the next diet.

Once one has learned to recognize hunger and has moved toward waiting for it most of the time, trusting that they can eat normally without having to fit all the good stuff between diets they will become more attuned to the bouts of emotion that seem to swell and sabotage the fragile trust with food.

Binges are not failures. They should be avoided, but they are a natural part of the journey and they signal a need to add new tools for coping with stress, anger, frustration, sadness, and other negative feelings to their toolbox.

Early in the process the person who has struggled with emotional eating for most of their life knows one thing that works to anesthetize the ugliness of negative feelings. Food.

Because the feelings are so negative, so overwhelming, the compulsion to end the negative feeling is stronger than most anything else and will usually win out over sheer willpower.

What this means is that one must gradually integrate and practice new ways of dealing with negative emotions so that they no longer need to eat in order to deaden them.

There are many tools for dealing with negative feelings and each person needs to develop their own strategies. I find that if I can interrupt the intense emotion with something else, I can usually avoid eating over it. Sometimes taking a walk when I am angry allows my ire to melt and my feelings to become more moderate so that I can face the task of talking to the person who angered me. Sometimes curling up with a book if I am sad, or journaling about a troubling incident is all I need to do. As I am able to process the negative feelings they melt and I am able to get on with things without using food to calm emotions.