Emotional Eating is about Safety
Emma Murphy MIACP
CEO Eating Freely - The World's Leading Network of Emotional & Binge Eating Specialists I Disordered Eating Specialist I Expert Speaker I License our Specialist Program for your healthcare organisation.
When it comes to working with clients with emotional eating and binge eating disorder, the very first and most critical thing to understand is that emotional eating and binge eating is a safety behavior.
So we can NEVER ask a client to give up emotional eating or binge eating straight away, until we build up a toolkit of other resources for them to be able to use instead of eating as a response to the threat they feel when they are stressed, distressed, upset, or trying to avoid conflict or some other form of negative event or emotion.
?In my video today, I walk you through how emotional eating is about safety, and give suggestions on how to begin building up that toolkit for clients. I also cover what NOT to do in the early days!
SUMMARY
1 ??How Emotional Eating becomes a Safety Behaviour
Often you will learn your client grew up in an alcoholic household, a household that was chaotic, dysfunctional, violent, abusive, or had other challenges.
A child in that situation may have found it very difficult to ask their caregivers for help or support to understand what was going on.
In the absence of being able to have somebody else soothe them and regulate them back down out of their stressed state, caused by the events/challenges they experienced, they learned how to self-soothe and self-regulate with food.
Over time, this becomes internalized as a safety mechanism for the brain.
Over time this becomes an unconscious, internalized auto pilot, so it is not within the client's conscious control to stop it.
2 ??Why habit change and lifestyle change won’t ‘stick’ with emotional eating clients
Talking about willpower, habit change, or “doing something different other than eating”… is not the place to start when you're dealing with a client who has long standing emotional eating and binge eating disorder.
This client is stuck in “fight or flight” - their brain is stuck in hypervigilance, so they are ‘up to ninety’ most of the time.
Important to build up a toolkit of resources to help clients come out of hypervigilance, and have other things that they can do to help reduce the cortisol in their body.
It's important to understand that we are not asking the client to give up their emotional eating or binge eating at all in the early stages.
3 ??Reflective questions for clients
Q Am I addicted to stress?
Q Do I constantly leave things to the last minute and/or seem to have a lot of drama in my life?
Often when somebody has been running cortisol for a long time, their adrenal glands actually get addicted to cortisol, or need cortisol to prompt them to do anything.
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4 ??Actions to take, and not to take!
Epsom salts baths or footbaths
Guided visualisations, sleepytime stories at night
NOT meditation or mindfulness in the early days – too soon!
I hope you find this video and explanation of emotional eating as a safety behaviour helpful, and as always please feel free to reach out to me any time with any questions you have, or if you would like me to cover anything specific in my newsletter!
With warm wishes,
Emma
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