Can Meditation Help With Emotional Eating?
Meditation and Emotional Eating
Meditation is mainstream now, with the CALM App, and the Peloton App.
Mindfulness and meditation are wonderful supports for menopause, when life can feel stressful, symptoms may not be subsiding, and the struggle with emotional eating feels overwhelming.
Meditation.
What does this have to do with eating?
Meditation helps to regulate emotions, by helping you process them. The meditation sessions don’t have to be long. Brief meditations can help you become more focused and peaceful (1).
This is good news for the fidgety meditators out there!
Meditation can help you calm your nervous system and bring awareness to why you eat in the first place.
It can help you ride the wave of a craving, until it passes, or until you tune in to the emotion behind the craving and address it.
Yes, you can address it by eating.
What you are doing is creating awareness of the emotion.
Meditation helps with emotional eating by increasing awareness of the process.
Pairing meditation, with mindful eating, raises your awareness around your food experience, along with more awareness or consciousness in your body. You will notice thoughts or feelings that are attached to food and body (2).
Meditation is one tool that can help you release judgement around these thoughts and feelings.
These thoughts and feelings may be the emotional drivers that send you to the fridge, to relieve anxiety, boredom, stress or anger.
We tend to think of meditating as a way to improve our relaxation response, and it definitely does.
However.
It also helps interrupt automatic behaviour (mindless eating, emotional eating) by increasing our ability to be aware of our thoughts, feelings and actions.
We may develop reactive patterns in our relationship to food. Some of these patterns arise from food insecurity, or as a coping mechanism. For me it was anxiety, food insecurity, and also loneliness.
When you start to understand the emotions behind your drive to soothe with food, you grow what we call Inner Wisdom
Food, and emotional eating, helped me feel safe.
Meditation can also contribute to calmness and a feeling of safety
It helped me become aware, more mindful, of my own eating behaviour. I could see that it was tied to restriction, and emotional coping.
Meditation can help us feel satisfaction in the food we choose. Satisfaction is a key ingredient in satiety, or feeling full! Satisfaction turns off Neuropeptide Y, one of the peptides that signals the brain to be done with eating.
Meditation is also helpful in becoming more aware of other areas of our life where we may be anxious or reactive. If there are things you are trying to change, (I like to refer to this as areas of yourself you wish to grow) awareness is KEY to that growth.
You can’t grow from what you don't know.
What do you need to start meditating?
All you need to start is a willingness to try, a few minutes and a kind attitude toward yourself.
Just like yoga, meditation & mindful or intuitive eating is a PRACTICE. There is no right way.
If you want to explore a brief glimpse of meditation and mindful eating, try my Cravings, Busted Mini Class.
It will walk you through physical hunger, and emotional hunger. You will receive an audio meditation a few days after signing up!
Instead of looking at emotional eating as WRONG. how about use the word ADAPTATION.
We adapted to cope.
And we can always RE-adapt, when we pause & notice, and look at what is happening inside of us, without judgement.
Be curious, be happy and be YOU.
xo
Tanya
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.01074/full
Kristeller, Jean L, and Kevin D Jordan. “Mindful Eating: Connecting With the Wise Self, the Spiritual Self.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 9 1271. 14 Aug. 2018
Tang, Yi-Yuan et al. “Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 104,43 (2007): 17152-6.