Let’s take a trip back in time to your childhood…When you were a little kid and something bad happened, say you scraped your knee, did your mother try to soothe you by giving you a treat like ice cream?
Can you think back to how the ice cream made you feel?
Your wound still smarted and your ego was a little bruised, but gosh darn for a fleeting few minutes or so, didn’t that ice cream make all the pain go away?
Well guess what? Decades later, when you’re feeling blue or down in the dumps that childhood memory buried in your subconscious is alive and well.
Only now, if you’re overweight, the subconscious decision to polish off a pint of ice cream won’t make the mental pain go away.
The decision to eat high-sugar or high-sodium treats with little to no nutritional value is a misfiring of the reward mechanism of your brain.
Your subconscious brain tells you that you’ll feel better if you treat yourself to a snack, even though your conscious mind knows that junk food is bad for you.
Clearly, childhood memories (either buried or remembered) exert a powerful emotional gravitational pull, informing our decisions for better and, unfortunately, in the case of diet, usually for worse.
How To Break Emotional Eating Patterns
In my health coaching programs, I “teach” people how to have a very loving relationship with their body fat. It’s impossible to conquer negative emotional eating patterns without facing your past. Part of the human experience is pain, suffering and their consequent trauma. Very few among us are not self-medicating with food.
[Schedule a call with me and I’ll reveal my winning brain-flip strategy for overcoming emotional eating.]To move past emotional eating, you need to face your past, appreciate your “story” yet also recognize that the trauma is something that you can and must let go of. I will be your guide in reaching this totally doable goal.
Why You Need—And Deserve—To Let Go Of Old Patterns
If you live in a mindset of shame and poor body image, it feeds (literally) that negative feedback loop. This brings me back to what I stated above about the misfiring of the reward mechanism of the brain…
Even though the ice cream of your youth helped you heal, at least emotionally, eating junk food creates the constant need to light up the pleasure center of the brain. The thing is that shortly after you feel “high” after eating ice cream, the activity levels of the neurotransmitters that activate dopamine (the reward chemical) plummets.
And just like you have a craving for a sugary snack if your blood sugar is low, you’ll have an intense craving for more junk when your dopamine levels crash. This negative feedback loop, or vicious circle, if you will, is the reason why you can’t conquer your desire for dopamine-stimulating foods like ice cream.
Eating sugary snacks may stimulate the reward system of your brain, but it does so at the expense of your health and self-confidence.
If you’re struggling with emotional overeating, the first step in conquering it is to deem yourself worthy of self care. The good news is you don’t have to go at it alone…
The Second Step To Overcoming Emotional Eating
My promise to you is that I will hold your hand every step of the way and help you at a pace that you’re comfortable with. I use the latest cutting-edge research and techniques that will help you conquer emotional eating for good.
SCHEDULE A CALL with me right now.
There’s no obligation and no fee for the call.You have nothing to lose and everything to gain—except the weight. 😉
To your health transformation,
Jenna L. Witt, APRN
Family Medicine/Functional Medicine
Certified Health Coach
Email: fundamentalwellnessne@gmail.com
Ph: 1-800-964-5091
