The long term impact of emotional eating on your MENTAL energy

This week is part 2 of my 4-part series on the true costs and consequences of long standing emotional and binge eating on your or your client's MENTAL energy.

When working with emotional eating, for me the first energy to look at is mental energy. Where is the client's mental energy being directed and spent?

Video on the Impact of Emotional Eating on Mental Energy

Because emotional/binge eating are so often underpinned by trauma, the mental energy aspect is key. When there is old trauma, clients can be stuck in a 'fight or flight' mental pattern. Effectively many clients are somewhere on the PTSD spectrum. What this means is that they can be hypervigilent - always on guard, and simply waiting for the next threat to come along.

Where does this come from? Let's look at a very common adverse experience that our clients have gone through to explain it.

Let's imagine our client had a parent who is/was an alcoholic, or had a diagnosed or undiagnosed mental health condition (both very common here in 1970's Ireland). For a percentage of these clients this parent was unpredictable, prone to outbursts of anger, violent, chaotic or unreliable.

So what did our client learn and internalise as a child?

• The world is not safe or predictable;
• I cannot rely on things being consistent, because things change constantly;
• I cannot trust people to follow through on their promises;
• I cannot trust other people to look after me;
• My own mother/father didn't love me, therefore I must be unlovable.

So here is where the hypervigilence starts. What sort of humor will Mum/Dad be in today? How do I need to be? Quiet? Helpful? Not around? Or around to protect younger siblings or my other parent?

This child is taking on inappropriate responsibility at a young age.

And as you will see in the video, this type of experience can:

• create a high need for control and routine;
• result in a long-standing cortisol cascade due to high levels of enduring stress;
• cause the child to focus on meeting other people's needs ahead of their own;
• keep this adult trapped in a cycle of fear, instead of being able to function from a place of love or compassion, particularly when it comes to self-care.

What clients learned back in the day was that food was a source of self-soothing. In a situation like I describe above, our client was often unable to turn to a parent for the support they needed - because their parent(s) were often either part of the problem, or kept very busy trying to manage the problem. When they discovered that food could comfort them, by triggering dopamine which counteracts cortisol, they turned to eating to self-soothe.

The brain, wanting to be efficient, created a connection, which it turned into an autopilot - 'when I get stressed, I can eat to calm down'.

So today, whenever our client is stressed - and you will see in the video that clients can be chronically stressed - their brain triggers emotional eating, which in itself becomes a problem for the client over time.

Video on the Impact of Emotional Eating on Mental Energy

Whether you struggle with emotional eating yourself, or you are working with clients presenting with emotional eating, I hope you find this helpful. As always feel free to reach out with any questions or feedback, I'm happy to hear from you!

UPCOMING TRAININGS AND RESOURCES

Masterclass – Embracing the neurodivergent client and diverse eating – Friday 21st April

Masterclass - Working with emotional eating and binge eating disorder ?– Friday 28th April

Next full training to specialise in emotional/binge eating starts 8th May. 4 places remaining.

Buy The Four Energies of Emotional Eating Card Deck