Most of the time, food in our house is fun.
We all love cooking, we all love eating and one of the signs for me that I'm doing well with lots of energy is when I'm getting excited about being creative in the kitchen. But. Food has also meant other things to me and I have used it in different ways over the years to avoid or try to change my emotions. I've used food in stressful times, to fend off sadness (we see this representation everywhere too. The girl in the movie after the breakup with a tub of ice-cream and a spoon...) or to break up boredom. All those things are okay as long as they are okay with you and not causing problems but sometimes, because we've learned that food is a fixer, we can struggle to put it down as the first solution when it's not working for us anymore. EFT works (gently, always) with our beliefs and emotions to help us understand where we learnt about food as a strategy and how we might have made it mean something that might not be helpful to us. It won't stop you enjoying a treat but it does give you a choice where once it might have felt more of an impulse. Using food to feel better is so common and so accepted in our society that we don't always notice it but if you associate a certain type of food with relaxation, you find yourself eating when you're not hungry or when you think about food you think about challenges with it, there is probably something there to look at. Our associations can be made and reinforced over years and intertwined with beliefs about our bodies, ourselves and the world so there may be more there than you realise. This is also true for many of the other ways we soothe difficult emotions. I used to be a smoker and when I gave up it was the last cigarette of the day - 5 minutes outside quietly looking at the stars usually - that I missed most. It was a moment where I gave myself permission to do nothing else and I used to try and make it last. Of course there was no reason I couldn't take that time anyway and I now understand that smoking definitely did not relax my body, but that wasn't what I believed at the time and the associations I had meant that I chased that relaxation through the cigarettes. There is still an element of that for me with food. If it's been a long, tough week I might get in some things that feel especially indulgent - and if I'm honest when I'm in that mood it's usually more than I will really enjoy. I allow that to a degree and sometimes there are other things at play (hormones maybe, or the 10,000 Christmas Roses tins?!) but there is a line when I don't really know why I'm carrying on, where it has stopped feeling like a treat and where I need to say okay, enough. When I struggle to draw my line I use EFT which works with the emotion and the real need that I'm trying to meet in that moment. There have been times in my life that food has been problematic. Often I've used it to make me feel better - usually with lots of unhealthy snacks - which has implications for my health, energy and finances. At other times, I've eaten too little because stress has caused me to lose appetite, because of my beliefs about what I 'should' eat or look like or because manipulating my diet has helped me feel in control. Food and eating are incredibly personal. I personally don't tap for weight loss because I don't believe it correlates with health but if your behaviours around food or any other craving are problematic for you then there is something to work with through EFT. When we can clean up our beliefs and behaviours around food, we often find we can enjoy it and have fun with it more easily. EFT is not a replacement for medical treatment.
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AuthorI'm Jess, EFT Practitioner & mindfulness teacher, adoptive mum to two adorable little fireworks and a passionate advocate of the idea that change really is possible, no matter how far away it feels. Archives
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