Are we all emotional eaters?

I often used to eat when I was bored.  What I used to find uncomfortable, no, make that intolerable, about being bored were the feelings of frustration and low level anxiety that accompanied the boredom, when I didn't fill every single moment of my day with something (anything) to do. The more I listened to the quiet whispers of my mind, when I did have a lull in activity, the quiet little voice that said  "you should be doing something, you are nothing if you are doing nothing, who are you anyway? You're not good enough, you should do more not less, prove yourself, get it right, be beyond reproach, make sure you are approved of and admired, keep going, come on, don't stop, it's not enough, you're not enough ...." the more anxious and frustrated I felt. And eating, as always, distracted me from those feelings and those thoughts.

My overeating had a very clear pattern. I'd head straight for the fridge when I arrived home after work (in my pre-chidlren days) and stand there are the fridge thinking "What can I have?" I used to overeat in the evenings after dinner, once everything I needed to do was done and I could finally sit down. I used to overeat at night, in bed, before I went to sleep. I used to overeat whenever I was alone. No rhyme or reason, just me alone meant I would overeat. It was like a mathematical formula. Sophie + alone = overheating  (s+a=o) I always had a croissant or Danish with my coffee, a few biscuits or some chocolate with my tea. I always had another helping of pasta or seconds of pudding. I would always eat the whole sandwich, both halves, finish every crisp in the pack, every square in the bar of chocolate. I didn't really question these habits, so were they were just that, just habits? Not emotional eating or comfort eating, just habits?

Well, that may be one way to look at it.  Today I see it a little differently. They may well have become habits (dictionary definition - regular or settled tendency or practice, especially one that it hard to give up) and, the way I think of it today, any behaviour that becomes a habit is a behaviour that, originally, I created for a reason. It had a purpose once, even if as time goes by I stop associating that behaviour with its original purpose and it just feels like a habit. So, while it may not be directly driven by feelings or emotions they played a part in me creating the habit in the first place. The fact that I habitually took food to bed with me, to eat and read before I feel asleep, may not have be directly triggered by any feelings of anxiety that I was aware of at the time, and at some stage when first I chose to take food to bed the food had a function, it did a job.

Here's the thing about habits. Even if we don't identify any feelings associated with them, NOT doing what we've always done WILL engender a feeling. Not taking food to bed when it has always been my habit to do so will leave me feeling something... In my experience that was fear! Not finishing every square in the bar of chocolate will leave me feeling... longing, wanting, sad. Not hugely, heart-wrenchingly sad, just a little sad. Even though I know I can have chocolate whenever I like, I will have an emotional response of some sort when I choose to stop when my impulse, my habit, is to finish it off. If I tell myself it's just a habit that I have to break and simply stop doing it, or doing something else instead or talking myself out of the need for the habit without recognising how I feel, ignoring the fear or anxiety or sadness (however mild or slight), numbing myself to my emotions, I  know, for myself, from my experience, that I will turn to other behaviours and create new habits to deal with the situations, emotions and thoughts that my eating originally helped me to manage. Because even when I don’t acknowledge the feelings or recognise them, they are there and I cannot hold on to them indefinitely without some kind of outlet or some way to numb them. If I am not willing to see that my eating in bed provided a comfort, a moment of numbness, a buffer between me and sleep, the dreaded nothingness of the night, that scary moment when I really let myself do nothing at all, if I ignore all that and just stop eating, summoning willpower and resolve, that anxiety will come out somewhere else. Of that I have no doubt. If, on the other hand, I am willing to recognise that I am an emotional being, I feel, all the time, and if I am willing to acknowledge how the food helps in that moment and allow myself to be with that fear or the anxiety or whatever the feeling, to work with it, just for a minute, I will be dealing with the real issue. Not the food or the eating, but the fear itself, the fear which drives my eating and my habits. And if I can make friends with that fear, if I can trust myself to be with it and know that it will not swallow me up, that it will not destroy me, then I no longer need the habit of eating to numb myself. Choosing not to overeat may even feel liberating, joyful, exciting and empowering and, a Brene Brown so rightly says, we cannot numb our emotions selectively.  When we numb anger, sadness and fear we numb our capacity to truly feel joy and happiness.

A habit is just another word for a behaviour driven by thoughts or feelings which we don't know how to stop doing and don't always understand the reasons for.  In my experience getting to the root of the habit, working out what it does (or did) for us and dealing with THAT is the key. Recognising that even those moments when we eat and cannot for the life of us work out what is behind it, will leave us feeling something when we STOP doing it. Which means that all our eating, in some way or other, is emotional. We may not always be aware of it but we are always, always feeling something. We are, I believe, all emotional eaters because we are all emotional women and in everything we do and experience, our thoughts, our emotions and our physical bodies are involved. All the time! And I think that is something to celebrate not shy away from. I am proud to call myself emotional and grateful to have recognised and worked with my emotional eating habits.

Beyond Temptation?

Gretel Hallet, is a Trained Chocolate Fairy and is running the Getting Started half day workshop in Norwich - perfect for beginners to experience the core principles of Beyond Chocolate and equally great as a refresher for any Beyond Chocolater. If you live in East Anglia and want to know more about Beyond Chocolate or her workshops, get in touch with Gretel.

I recently attended Sophie and Audrey Boss’s first ‘Beyond Temptation’ workshop and can recommend it 100% - it will definitely help those of you who have been working with Beyond Chocolate for a while to move up to the next level. It will also serve as a good introduction to anyone who is looking for a new way forward that takes them away from self-destructive over-eating and dieting.
Before I say anything else, I would like to thank those ladies on the course who told me they read and enjoyed my blogs – I was very humbled and pleased to know that what I write is helping other people – I write very much to help myself process things I’m learning about myself and about being a Beyond Chocolater and it’s great to know that other women find that helpful with their own practice.
I loved being on the workshop; it was a very safe space with very lovely women all speaking the Beyond Chocolate language of non-dieting and managing food and our eating in a more caring and productive way. Every woman on that course was truly inspiring, truly beautiful in her own right and I hope they all got as much out of the day as I did.
So – am I now beyond all temptation? Can I walk past a bakery without being sucked in as if by some horizontal Charybdis? Do I turn my nose up at buffets? Am I eating only salads and ‘healthy foods’? Am I getting my five-a-day? Am I exercising religiously? Do I follow all the Beyond Chocolate principles to the letter? Would you hate me if I said ‘yes’ to any or all of those?!
Because actually the answer is ‘of course not’! That’s not what I want for my life. I love bakeries, buffets and salads – I don’t want to be beyond some of them and grimly champing my way through others because they’re ‘good for me’ … after all, if nothing else, the goal-posts on what’s ‘good for us’ changes almost daily.

I want to be able to eat cake when I want cake. The difference now is that I know when I’m hungry for cake and when, actually, I really do want the freshness and crunch of a salad, or a crusty French stick, or the soothing smoothness of home-made soup, or the rich meltiness of Cadbury’s Giant Buttons.

One thing the Beyond Temptation day reminded me was of the importance of finding out about myself, my appetite, my needs and desires. If I don’t know what I want, it’s likely I’ll eat something that’s available and if it doesn’t satisfy, I’ll eat something else and something else until I’m either so stuffed I can’t possible eat any more, or until I hit something that is satisfying. Eating by trial and error is very much part of learning how to utilise the Beyond Chocolate principles in my life.
So, I will be practicing Tuning In for a while. It’s easy, cheap (!), quick and virtually undetectable. At least it will be once I can do without closing my eyes and muttering to myself … The more I Tune In, the more I will find out about myself, the more likely I am to be able to spot more exactly what I want to eat, how much and when. And when it all matches and I don’t over-eat, boy does it feel good! And that feeling acts as a spur to me to do it again and again.

So, as I said, I don’t want to be beyond all temptation, but I do want to be in control more often than not – and I also want, on occasion to dive headfirst into a very large, very sticky cake! Hooray for Beyond Chocolate!

Lighten the Load

Do you have any idea just how many women overeat? Not just a little bit every now and then but the kind of overeating that we feel ashamed of, that we hide from our friends, colleagues and family. The kind of overeating that we would be mortified if anyone found out about. The overeating that we think is disgusting, out of control, crazy… So many women do it. The most damaging thing about it is the guilt and the shame that we carry around with us like a heavy rucksack on our backs. What makes overeating so painful, so agonising, is the way we torture ourselves about it. And it’s the secrecy that perpetuates the shame and the pain.

Have you ever talked about your overeating? Or is it a secret? Have you ever talked about you overeating with your mates, your mum, your sister or your partner? Do you mention it at all? Maybe you make light of it, pass it off as an inconsequence, allude to it without going into detail about how you really feel, or maybe you avoid talking about it altogether. Do you talk about what it’s really like to be desperate to lose weight or how you feel about your body? Mostly we stay silent, we hide, we keep the secret. We don’t talk about overeating. The idea of telling anyone is horrifying.

In fact, if we are willing to talk about it, we can lighten the load. By being honest, with others and with ourselves, by not hiding and guarding our overeating as a secret, we make it more ordinary and less dramatic. Barely a decade ago no one would have admitted to feeling depressed. Today there's so much less shame about it than there used to be and so much more understanding and compassion. How would it be to tell someone about your overeating? Someone you trust. You don't have to tell them everything. It doesn't have to be a big confession, it's about taking one small step towards telling it as it really is rather than colluding with womankind about how pathetic we are, how all we need is a bit more willpower, an ounce more self control. When we can talk about it, about what it's really like, even just a little bit, we start to dispel the taboo and we feel lighter, freer and better about ourselves. And in talking and breaking the silence, we give others permission to do the same.

You don't have to carry the guilt, shame, embarrassment (whatever it's like for you) around with you all the time. Join us for the Beyond Temptation Workshop on 3rd March and lighten the load. Meet like minded women, have an eye opening, enlightening, memorable day - one which will show you how to transform you life with food so that you feel normal and in control around food.

Beyond Temptation?

When the only way we know how to cope with the unpleasant moments is to eat a cookie (or 10 or 20...), when we have no other options, when nothing else feels possible... we can feel powerless, hopeless, crazy...

When we know that eating a cookie... or as many cookies as we want, is one option among many... When we know that we can manage every moment in life without food if we want to... then sometimes eating the cookie(s) may be the way we choose.. without guilt... without beating ourselves up, without feeling out of control... without needing to eat the whole packet and the one next to it in the cupboard... and then the crisps and cheese and pizza and coke and anything else we can get our hands on... without feeling the need to make up for it the next day by being good or eating less, or exercising that bit harder.

When we know how to have a balanced relationship with food... when we have choices and strategies and support... we are in charge!

When we can say NO to the cookie NOT because we think it's fattening so we ought to avoid it, NOT because we summon every ounce of willpower, NOT because we tell ourselves we're stupid or weak or crazy or pathetic or greedy for eating cookies when we should just pull ourselves together, but because we consider all the options available to us and (the vast majority of the time) eating cookies just isn't the most satisfying one...

Then we are truly in the moment, truly empowered, truly Beyond Temptation, for ever!!

Can't wait to publish this book - we're nearly there.

Introducing The Pause ...

Gretel Hallet, is a trained Chocolate Fairy and is running the Getting Started half day workshop in Norwich. If you live in East Anglia and want to know more about Beyond Chocolate, get in touch with Gretel.

If you recall from a previous post, my poor beleaguered colleague Bea? The one who has been advised to lose weight by a health-care professional and who has since been subject to the attentions of the Deadly Dieting Duet of our colleagues Vee and Jay? Well, today I had an opportunity to introduce her to The Pause.


It happened like this....


In a busy office, there are few moments when I can talk to Bea about Beyond Chocolate, and she has previously expressed an interest. But on this day, due to a concatenation of circumstances, I got lucky. Jay is on holiday, the Boss was out at a meeting, Vee was called out to deal with some family crisis, leaving Bea and me alone in the office.


Miraculously no-one rang or called in and all our other staff seemed to be gainfully employed elsewhere. We really were on our own for a few, rare moments.


I asked Bea how she got on at her appointment for her blood sugar and she said it was going down, which the health professional was pleased about. Then she confided that she knew she often ate in the evenings, when watching TV and that she wasn’t eating because she was hungry, but because she was bored.


Bea said she had been trying to keep herself busy instead, distracting herself from the desire to eat when not hungry (a classic diet tactic). I said that may work for a while, but it’s not possible to always be so busy that we can’t cram food in as well. She acknowledged that could be the case. I said that ‘keeping busy’ for the sake of avoiding eating was also avoiding whatever was driving the urge to eat. Bea agreed with that. I said I could offer her something she may like to experiment with as an alternative and she said she’d be pleased to hear it.


So I explained The Pause. 


Like this.


If we have reached the point in our self-awareness that we know we are eating for reasons other than hunger, we can then exercise a choice on what to do about our urge to eat. We can choose to still eat, acknowledging that it helps and that this is what we are doing right now to support ourselves to deal with whatever is causing the urge to eat. Or we can choose to Pause and break the automatic hand to mouth action and THEN decide if we still want to eat, or not.


We can do it like this:


1. Identify the urge to eat has been caused by something other than hunger, and decide 
(on this occasion, just once) to use The Pause.
2. Decide how long we are willing to sit with whatever is provoking the desire to eat (this can be anything from 1 second to several minutes, start small.)
3. Set that amount of time on a timer and put it nearby.
4. Sit with the emotions that come up. Notice physical sensations, thoughts.
5. PROMISE ourselves that if we still want to eat, we will. If not, we won’t.
6. When the time is up decide to eat, or not.

That’s it. But, boy is it powerful! It has helped me to considerably reduce my over-eating and to move away from eating for emotional reasons. I recommend it unreservedly as a very useful tool to experiment with and hope that it will help Bea to move further away from dieting and towards the Freedom of Beyond Chocolate.