Enoughness

Enough...and having enough...trusting that there is enough... These are sometimes difficult things for people who suffer from eating disorders. Many of us overeat simply because we do not trust that there will be enough. We feel that if we don't eat whatever we want right now it will be gone and there will be no more. So we eat more than we need...stocking up for that future time when there won't be any more. While the behavior may (probably does) stem from a time when that was a positive action to protect us from the lack we may have suffered as children, when we keep practicing the behavior into adulthood when we have ready sources of food and other things we need, we get into a cycle of continually eating more than we need...continually stocking up. With food...the excess that we "stock up" on is stored in our bodies as fat.

Clearly, if we want to reach a place with intuitive eating where we are releasing excess weight we need to find peace with the issue of enough...and it isn't just about stopping when we have reached satiety, although that is the goal. In order to reach the goal we need to move ourselves to an emotional space where we trust that there will be enough of all the things we need. Enough food, enough love, enough intimacy, enough material things. In order to reach a space where we feel confident that we will have enough of whatever we need we need to begin to reparent ourselves...to step into the emotional breech that exists within us...and begin to foster a relationship with ourselves in which we always give ourselves exactly what we need.

Whether it is fortunate or unfortunate I am not sure...but food is a metaphor for many other things in our life. If we suffer from issues of not trusting there to be enough when it comes to food there is a good likelihood that we will suffer the same fear of lack in other areas of our lives as well. One of the things I have learned in following the intuitive eating approach is that food issues are rarely isolated. They are most often very interrelated and what we are doing with food is often a metaphor for other areas of our lives.

There is a good likelihood that feelings of lack in areas not directly related to food will trigger us to want to "stock up" with food as well. For example, if one feels a lack of love in their life, not only will they want to stock up on love when they find it...and not only will they not really trust that there will be enough...it will trigger feelings of lack that relate to food too...and they will find themselves stocking up in terms of food even though the area that initially felt a lack had nothing to do with food. Food is a metaphor for many other things.