The Single Common Denominator Of Emotional Eaters & Healing

For years I felt so much shame and guilt around being an emotional eater. Yet, that is just it. Emotional eaters tend to take on the weight of the world and feel more responsible than not. Did you get that? Taking on the weight of the world internally, lead to extra weight externally when we respond to stress with food.

The problem with emotional eating is when we gain extra weight and the impact that weight, or eating "junk" foods, can have on our health, self-esteem and emotional worlds.

First, a bit about emotional eaters. We typically put others way before ourselves. We can tend to overextend ourselves, over-worry and/or overdo. While I’m not sure which came first, the over-doing or the overeating, I am sure that we are very dedicated, highly empathic and deeply caring individuals. Sometimes, even to our own detriment.

When I was a teen, my mom gave me a quote on a card that stayed with me for years. It read, “Do not grow a wishbone daughter, where a backbone aught to be.” Meaning, do not continue to seek for the answers outside of yourself. We can wish we would stop overdoing it, we can wish our lives not to be stressful, but until we grow the backbone and stop giving our power away, we may get trampled on.

Emotional eaters are actually very strong deep down. For this reason, most emotional eaters overcome emotional eating and come out on the other end even better!

Emotional eating is like a trumpet call that it is time to put on the brakes and get real with ourselves. We are so caring, yet we beat ourselves up. We are so deeply moved by things that it is sometimes scary. This applies equally to worry and fears of success.

Some emotional eaters will turn more inward, while others will push forward into the world with “oomph”. Yet, both are equally experiencing an inner yearning. This inner yearning, somewhere along the way, we began to cover with food.

While these are generalizations about what the majority of emotional eaters experience, there is a common denominator that actually allows us to turn obstacles around food into opportunities of ravishing self-care!

The good news is that because all emotional eaters carry the common denominator of being so deeply caring, we can turn this around on ourselves and use self-care to gain major advantages in our own empowerment . You know the Golden Rule? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Here is the Golden Rule for the healing of emotional eating:

"I will do unto myself, as I would do unto another."