What is Comfort Eating?
Almost everyone engages in the act of comfort eating from time to time. It is common to reach for food when we are unhappy in life, feeling stressed, depressed, bored, or disempowered. Eating is an attempt to feel better in your body, have comfort, de-stress, stave off boredom, cheer up, or change how you are feeling.
Yet, comfort eating is uniquely strange paradox. You want to experience the sweetness of life and the fullness of love. Yet, even while you eat, especially when you eat to feel better, you rarely indulge in the exquisite sensations food offers. Afterwards, you are likely to feel miserable and guilty about overeating. In fact, you will probably end up feeling worse after comfort eating than you did before you ate the comfort foods. Most of the time comfort eating fails to provide the comfort you seek.
If you have relied on comfort eating to de-stress or cheer you up, you might now be carrying the after-effects of that eating in the form of extra weight. In general, the first action step you may take to lose weight is to go on some sort of diet plan. While following your plan, food continues to be a logical exercise and not a pleasant, life-enhancing sensory relationship. For instance, your focus shifts to how many calories or points can you ingest, or how many carbohydrates you can have with each meal. Your comfort foods, including burgers, chocolate, pizza, doughnuts, or cake, are now considered “bad” foods. While logically you “know” what you shouldn’t eat, you are even more tempted to treat yourself to this forbidden food.
Diet plans may solve the upper layer problem – which means they can help you lose weight. However, those plans do not provide a solution for your underlying core desires. Your original core needs are about wanting to enjoy your life more fully, feeling safe and secure in your own life, and being able to handle your emotions in new empowered ways.
If you are concerned about overeating for comfort, then one powerful solution involves learning to create a new relationship with food. Follow the tips below and discover how to change your comfort eating habits into joyful eating experiences and weight loss success:
Imagine Passionate Eating
Imagine your self feeling alive, breathing, and eating with passion and pleasure. Imagine eating when you are hungry and stopping at the perfect place of satisfaction. What does this vision look like for you? Your vision is unique and probably looks different from any other person’s visualization. What would “normal” pleasurable eating look like to you? I’ll write down one idea of passionate eating and then invite you to write down your ideas.
My version of a pleasurable dinner experience would involve cooking dinner for me and another person. Cooking is an intimate sensory experience where I enjoy the vibrant colors, take pleasure in the crisp vegetables as I chop them, and deeply inhale the first aromas of the cooking food as they fill the kitchen. Food is love. However, I know that the love doesn’t come from the food. The love comes from within me and is offered to the food. My love expands as I create with the food, and later as I accept the beauty, energy, and life of the food into my body.
The meal I lovingly prepare is served at an attractive table, clean of clutter, and arranged with pretty plates, folded napkins, decorative stemware, and a small bouquet of flowers. As I sit down, I stop for a moment to realize how wonderful I feel to participate in this abundance of life. The beautiful vegetables, grains, and meat offer their sunshine and life into my body. My eyes widen to accept the visual pleasure of the food. Inhaling deeply the aroma becomes part of my body. I begin to eat and each mouthful of food bursts with pleasure. The food pleasantly fills me up inside. Breathing, I accept the delight and life that is offered. I eat until my physical sensations become something other than pleasurable.
This is just one idea of what a pleasurable eating experience might look. Take a few minutes and write down your idea of a satisfying eating experience:
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Create A Passionate Eating Experience
One way to overcome feeling out of control with food is to begin forming a new relationship with food. Decide today to take one meal a week, and turn it into a pleasurable, full sensory, enjoyable experience. To do this involves just a little planning. Choose a meal that would be enjoyable to you, and fun to cook. Make a grocery list, and do a little shopping. Enjoy your grocery store experience as you choose the brightest vegetables and the highest quality meats. Bring your abundance home and be creative with your cooking. Turn up the music, dance a little, sing, and remember that your eating experiences do not always have to be torturous events.
Throw caution to the wind and treat yourself to one enjoyable meal experience a week. Decide you are deserving, and give yourself the gift of pleasure and enjoyment. As you fill up your eyes, ears, nose, and taste buds with overflowing pleasure, as you breathe with your experience of eating and digesting, notice there is less of a need to stuff your stomach. You deserve to experience your body in enjoyable ways. As you participate differently in your relationship with food, notice that you could venture outward into other pleasures. You could decide to enjoy the trees more, the wind, or even your partner or spouse. Pay attention to the pleasure available to you and decide that you are deserving of feeling good both inside and out!
Dr. Annette Colby, RD can help you take the pain out of life, turn difficult emotions into joy, release stress, end emotional eating, and move beyond depression into an extraordinary life! Annette is the author of Your Highest Potential [http://www.TheHighestPotential.com/] and has the unique ability to show you how to spark an amazing relationship with your life! Visit www.LovingMiracles.com [http://www.LovingMiracles.com/] to access hundreds of content filled articles and sign up for a Free subscription to Loving Miracles! newsletter.
