How to cope with emotions without food – building emotional tolerance

Let´s talk about feelings today. Specifically how to cope with emotions without food, i.e. how to deal with your uncomfortable feelings without eating.

As I mentioned in a previous post, emotional eating is one of the main reasons you might not be able to lose weight. You know how to eat healthily, you stick to your healthy habits most of the time but when something happens and triggers some uncomfortable feelings inside of you, you turn to food and overeat or even binge and you gain the weight back.

To prevent this from happening, you need to know what triggers these feelings and how to cope with these emotions without food.

I have lessons about how to identify these triggers in the How to stop eating your feelings workbook, in the Healthy Habits for Permanent Weight Loss course or you can start with these blog posts too to learn about it:

How emotional eaters usually deal with uncomfortable feelings

But now, let´s talk about how emotional eaters usually cope with emotions.

Usually, we do one or both of these two things:

Suppressing the feelings

We suppress these feelings with food (others may use alcohol, drugs, social media, gambling, etc.). We distract ourselves with the action of eating.

Eating calms you down, makes you feel good, helps you switch off and not think about your problem and not feel the feelings that you are trying to avoid.

As an added “benefit”, after overeating, you can also obsess about why you overate, how disgusting you feel, why you are such a failure, and how you are going to compensate for this overeating (planning your next restriction phase).

This keeps you busy for a while so you don´t have to deal with your real feelings that you would actually need to process.

Obsessing about their weight and body

You have a difficult life situation (relationship, career, financial, etc.) that you know that you should address, but you don´t. Why don’t you do it?

Because at some level you believe taking action now would be more painful than just putting it off.

So you start to obsess about your weight, and how your body looks.

You go on crazy fad diets and torture yourself with overexercising.

This keeps your mind busy so you don´t need to concentrate on your real-life problems (your unhappy relationship or your unbearable boss). It´s a distraction.

And if the uncomfortable feelings bubble up sometimes you go to number 1 and suppress them with eating.

What you need to do instead to learn to cope with emotions without food

What you need to do instead is identify your feelings and let them be. You don´t eat, just let the feelings bubble up and observe them. It´s incredibly hard to do, but once you learn to do it you will be able to stop eating to avoid your feelings, so it´s well worth the effort.

Nothing worth having comes easy. Just think back to your life achievements. For most of them, you had to work, they didn´t come easy. But now they are easy. It will be the same with feeling your feelings instead of eating them too.

Don´t run from your feelings, they can´t kill you. They are uncomfortable, but you can survive uncomfortable feelings and emotions without food.

However, suppressing your feelings can cause serious illnesses, such as cancer and autoimmune diseases. You can read about this correlation in the following blog post:

Sometimes we choose to feel uncomfortable

Sometimes we even know that we will feel uncomfortable and we don´t mind, we just power through them.

For example, we know that we will feel sore after a good workout but we don´t mind having some pain.

We know that we´ll feel horrible the next morning after going to a party and drinking too much and we´ve done it many times regardless.

Childbirth isn´t a walk in the park but we survived all that pain in exchange for a baby and we even forget how painful it was later.

We are scared when we´re on a rollercoaster but we do it anyway.

You know that you can deal with these feelings and that they go away after a while. They are not there forever.

All other feelings are the same

We can deal with anxiety, embarrassment, fear, shame, sadness, loneliness, tiredness, jealousy, heartbreak, guilt, anger, rage, impatience, hopelessness, and all the other negative feelings without eating. We don´t need to run to the kitchen and eat when we feel these feelings.

So the question is: how to cope with emotions without food?

Try to just sit at the kitchen table and watch your feeling come, recognize it, welcome it (Hello anxiety again, long time no see), expect it. Breathe into it. Tell yourself: I´m just having a perfectly normal human experience, it´s totally fine that I don´t feel good today, that I don´t feel happy, successful, or pretty, that I´m sad, angry, heartbroken, embarrassed, lonely …. today. Nothing bad can happen to me, this feeling will go away as all the other feelings always went away. I don´t need to do anything to make it go away.

Stay with the feeling, it really can’t hurt you, and just let it wash over you. If you start to resist it, fight with it or try to deny it, the feeling will resist.

Meditation to help you feel your feelings

I’ve made a meditation to help you sit with your feelings when you have the urge to overeat. Listen to this meditation often and you’ll learn how to process your feelings. You’ll be presently surprised to find that you won’t need to eat to suppress or numb them anymore.

After a while, you won’t need to listen to this meditation. Feeling your feelings becomes automatic and you will be free from emotional eating triggered by negative feelings. You’ll start eating your feelings much less often.

What is the worst thing that can happen if you let yourself feel your feelings?

When it comes right down to it, we don’t have much control over the good and bad things that happen to us. Two critical things we do have control over are our mindset and our responses to our circumstances.

Think of a fear you’re facing (or avoiding) right now. Ask yourself, what would your life look like if you decided to face that fear, head-on? What would it feel like if you showed courage – even a little bit? The courage to take a risk. The courage to be your true self. The courage to love others. The courage to love yourself.

Will it be easy? No.

Will you face obstacles? Yes.

Will you make mistakes? Yes.

Will it be worth it? Definitely!

This free training shows you the exact steps to break free from emotional and binge eating.

You can also use the How to stop eating your feelings workbook to discover what you are really hungry for and break free from emotional and binge eating right now.