How to Feel Your Feelings Instead of Eating Them

Did you grow up hearing "If you wanna cry, I'll give you something to cry about"? Or were you sent to your room when you got upset?

If you grew up with no tolerance for feeling emotions, how does it make sense that as an adult, you still don't have good coping strategies? So you do things like eat food, go shopping, or people please.

If you can relate, I'm so glad you're here.

Your Weight Loss Struggle Isn't About Food

Your weight loss struggle is about missing life skills you were never taught.

I had a client who said, "I didn't have any coping strategies." I stopped her right there. I said, "Wait a minute. You had a lot of unhealthy coping strategies."

Here's what they looked like:

• You said yes when you really wanted to say no
• You beat yourself up when you didn't do something right
• You rewarded yourself with food
• You exhausted yourself working hard to prove your worth
• You listened to what other people thought instead of yourself
• You did everything they wanted and then felt resentment
• You stayed up late playing Candy Crush
• You ate until your stomach was so full

These are unhealthy coping strategies, but they were ways to help you cope.

Now after being in my membership for over a year, she has healthy coping strategies:

• She creates boundaries with people
• She pays attention to her food when eating
• She allows discomfort
• She accepts that not everything will go perfectly
• She honors and pays attention to hunger
• She doesn't turn to food

The more you're aware of what you're doing, the more you can be healthy.

What Are Feelings, Really?

Feelings are just vibrations in our body. And feelings only come from our thoughts.

If you have the thought "My house is paid off, I have no more mortgage," that thought could make you feel really proud. Or if your friend says "I just paid off my mortgage," you could have a thought of "I'm jealous" or "That's not fair."

Our emotions come from our thoughts. They're like little hormones, like little cars that drive around and say, "This is your reaction to this situation."

Why We Try to Manage Emotions With Food

When we talk about eating food, it's a way to try to evoke a certain emotion. But the only way we can truly feel that emotion is when our brain has a thought and then tells the body, "Here it is."

We've been trying to manage, control, or manipulate our emotions instead of just feeling them.

Where Emotions Live in Your Body

When you become more sensitive to your feelings, you'll start noticing your own personal patterns:

• Head tension - Not allowing emotions to flow down, stuffing them
• Throat/Thyroid - Not telling your truth, always filtering what you say
• Shoulders - Burden, taking on too much responsibility
• Chest/Heart - Sadness or disappointment
• Upper diaphragm - Shame
• Lower belly - Guilt (denying yourself emotions or having two opposing thoughts)
• Hips and below - Fear

Our body keeps score. A lot of us who have difficulty with arthritis, thyroid issues, autoimmune diseases – these can be a pile-up of not dealing with trauma, difficulties, and challenges.

The Biggest Challenge: Not Trusting Your Feelings

One of the biggest challenges I see is that women don't know how to trust their feelings. They don't know how to go into their feelings.

I have a client who's 67 years old and has been working since she was six to avoid feelings because she was called a crybaby at school. Now she's missed out on all this intuitive wisdom that's inside of us.

She said to me, "I hear other people talk about feeling their feelings and I don't know how to do that. So I feel really dumb."

I told her: Your way of feeling your feelings is going to be different than other people.

How to Actually Feel Your Feelings

Here's what I teach my clients: Processing an emotion takes 10 seconds, 20 seconds, maybe a minute or two at most for a really deep one.

The whole time you're processing your emotions, you're safe. You're grounded. You're able to do it.

Inside my coaching program, I help women go into their bodies, feel the feelings, and then we go to that emotion, that pain, that discomfort. I ask, "What is my body trying to tell me right now?"

When we think we can lose weight by just following a diet, we're actually not being in tune with our own body. When I see women taking GLP-1s or distracting themselves with apps and calculating, they're missing out on their own wisdom.

The Missing Piece

When we didn't learn how to feel our feelings and be in tune with our body, we're missing a big piece of weight loss success.

I know how frustrating it is. I know how creative you are, how loving you are, how nurturing you are. But you're not able to be any of those things when your mind is full of beating yourself up, comparing yourself to others, and missing out on true connection with yourself and others.

You don't have a coping strategy problem. You have unhealthy coping strategies. And you can learn healthy ones.

That's what changes everything.

Conquer your emotional eating this holiday season with Dara's new course! Details HERE. 

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Have a question about weight loss, perfectionism or life coaching? Send me an email! [email protected]