To summarize my last post: If you are eating for the wrong reasons, the only way to make a change that is satisfying and lasting is to find other answers, solutions or strategies that address those reasons.
Real Change Means Making Peace With Food
In the Emotional Eating Toolbox™ program, I teach a process for making peace with food. Peace with food is different from losing weight (although people who make peace with food often lose weight), enduring a diet or food plan (peace with food is not about doing something with food you don’t want to do), depriving yourself and going “without,” or feeling out of control and resigned to a life where food is “the answer to everything” (except that it really isn’t). Peace with food happens when you can move past the food struggles and toward more satisfying solutions.
The Path to Peace With Food
It’s important to know that peace with food is available to anyone. Really. No matter how long you’ve fought with food or your weight, no matter how much you struggle with emotional eating, it’s possible to create a new and improved relationship with food. Just like any change, it’s a process of taking the correct steps and making adjustments and changes—in a way that works for you.
1. Peace With Food Requires New Answers
Peace with food only happens when you move beyond the food and start creating better, more effective, more satisfying answers. When you have a range of strategies to comfort yourself, to celebrate, to cope with anxiety or stress or boredom or loneliness, and when you know how to really zero in on what it is your spirit is needing or craving (the things that are not food)—guess what happens? Food loses some of its charisma and its importance. Oh sure, it still tastes good, and sometimes you’ll want to eat more than is really good for you, but the struggle to NOT eat and the drive to overeat or keep eating, is transformed. Because food doesn’t have the power that it once had—and—because you now have some higher quality solutions.
In the next post, I’ll go into more depth on how to successfully make peace with food and will show you how it really can make a difference.
