Category: Mental Health

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Emotional Eating

What is emotional eating?

Emotional eating can be visible in plain sight. It can be as transparent as I am sad or mad or happy and I want to eat something to make this emotion and situation more bearable. That is what most people think of when they think of emotional eating – the pint of Ben and Jerry’s that is needed after a break up that every romantic comedy features. But emotional eating isn’t always so obvious. We can be emotional eating and not even realize. 

Emotional eating can be a way to avoid feelings that haven’t even come up yet. You may think I am not feeling anything – how can this be emotional eating? The truth is emotional eating can come from a place of preventing the emotions from coming up in the first place. You may not feel them because the act of eating, not eating or thinking about food is preventing you from feeling anything.  You might feel completely “normal” and still be emotionally eating.

When we emotional eat we literally push those feelings deep within us. It is act of pushing things down through food. The food is literally filling us up and pushing those emotions inside of us away from our heart and away from our mind so that we don’t have to think about them. If we eat – we don’t need to feel how lonely we are, we don’t need to feel how worthless we are, we don’t need to feel how overwhelmed we are, how unimportant and incapable we feel, how stressful work is – all we need to feel is the food inside of us; the fullness and maybe the guilt of having eaten something we didn’t want to.

It is a way of replacing the emotions that we feel from situations we can’t control and maybe can’t explain with emotions and sensations of something we can – food. If we binge on a food that we don’t want and feel bad about ourselves because of it we then have created a reason for why we feel bad. We have created a circumstance that made us feel bad, something that our brains can wrap their head around for why we don’t feel like a worthwhile person and something that we can maybe try and control.

Emotional eating could look something like this

…………

You come home from dinner with a friend and you are feeling like a failure, like no one likes you, like you are an inadequate employee who can’t do anything right. You get home overwhelmed knowing that you can’t change these feelings – or you come home just overwhelmed not exactly knowing why you are feeling overwhelmed or worthless

You go to the fridge – anything to soothe the anxiety, the overwhelm, the feeling that you are not good enough – you pull out something to eat; anything to eat even though you have just eaten with a work colleague before you got home – you know you aren’t hungry but you just need to feel better and this promises to help.

You eat it all – whatever it was, whatever was there – and for a moment while you are eating it and tasting it – you are not thinking about how you feel about yourself – for a moment it is helping. But when it is done all of those things come flooding back but this time those same feelings are because of what you ate

Suddenly you are not an unworthy person because of things beyond your control but you are unworthy because of what just happened with food – you are inadequate because you ate more than you needed to, because you ate when you didn’t want to, because you lost control

Whether any of those things are true or not is irrelevant – what is relevant is that now you are feeling bad because of the food and the food is something that you can comprehend and deal with and change – before you were feeling bad about something else- something intangible – some space inside of you that made you believe that those negative feelings about yourself were true, even if they aren’t. That is impossible to wrap your head around, impossible to deal with.

……….

When overwhelm comes from a place that we can’t connect with, can’t understand and can’t change it is easier to project those feelings onto something else.  Food is one way to cope with those feelings. It is a way to distract us from what is really going on beneath the surface. It is one way to make sense of the unexplainable emotions inside of us or the overwhelm of our daily life. It does not solve the problem. It just gives us something else to focus on.

Are you emotional eating?

Each time you eat ask yourself – what is the purpose of me eating this right now? Is it because I want it, is it because I feel like I need it, is it to nourish my body or is it because I am trying to hide from something – is it because I am feeling uncomfortable in my skin and in who I am and I can’t deal with that?

No matter what the answer is, it is okay– you can still eat the thing, but asking can help us to notice what is going on underneath the service. It can help us to see our patterns with food – the ways in which we might be engaging with it beyond actually nourishing our bodies.

If you are not feeling good in your relationship with food, there is probably more going on than you think. It is not the food. The food is only one part of the big picture. The way we think about food, the way we engage with food, the way we feel about ourselves, what is going on in our lives – it can all influence our relationship with food. It takes looking at all of it to finally break the cycle that we are in. It takes looking at it all to finally release the hold that food has on our lives and our overall wellbeing.

It is possible. I promise.  I am here to help. Book your free 15 minute consultation to learn about how you can feel comfortable with food again and reclaim your life.  

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Self-Isolation and Your Food Relationship

It has been a long week; a very different week for most of us. Schedules have changed. Leaving the house isn’t an option. The things that normally keep us sane we may not be able to do. For some of us this could be a chance to get some much needed sleep, get caught up on a television series, catch up on video chat with some friends, do some spring cleaning or whatever it is that we haven’t done around the house because we were too busy, but for others being at home can bring on its own set of anxieties especially around food.

Suddenly the day doesn’t revolve around going to work, working and coming home. Working from home, the hours can start to blend together, the anxiety can start to creep in, and with the inability to leave the house one of the easiest ways to cope with the impeding uncertainty, anxiety and boredom is with food.  It is the perfect distraction – something you have to do anyways at some point in the day– an excuse to not think about what is going on.  It is an easy thing to do to reach for a snack when we are feeling overwhelmed or bored or when we just don’t know what to do with ourselves.

Eating and emotions are VERY closely tied in our society. The first thing to remember is THAT IS OKAY. It is okay that we have created a society where our emotions and food and hunger are all intertwined. This was not something that we consciously chose to participate in, but that we were drawn into as a collective whole. It is an underlying construct in our society the same way that the expectations of what women and what men do is. It takes awareness of these unconscious processes for us to be able to change them and it takes a village, a collective shift among what the role of food in our society is.

We are starting to see this shift in the world of gender over the last couple of years. Women are drawing attention to the unconscious biases and expectations that surround their role in society – they are bringing forward the expectations that we didn’t even know we as a society had – the ones that are so unconscious that they just seem like facts. Drawing awareness to these unconscious expectations is the first step in creating change. How can we change something that we aren’t even aware exists?

This concept is the same thing that needs to happen with our collective relationship with food. The first thing is understanding how you view food and how you interact with it as an individual and why you feel this way. Does it feel like this is how it is supposed to be based on our social interactions and collective understanding of what food is?

Instead of feeling the anxiety of what is going on in the world, or your life or your mind – food and eating or not eating can bring up its own set of anxieties, often unrelated to what is happening in the external world. Food and our relationship with it can serve as a reflection of what is happening inside of us. With us being able to engage in very little outside of our homes right now, this relationship with food and our internal world can feel very amplified. That doesn’t mean that anything has changed, or that things are getting worse – what it means is that you are paying more attention to it. The distractions outside of this have fallen away and the bare bones of your food reality is staring you right in the face every moment of every day. That begs the question.

What do we do now?

What we do is we start to pay attention. We start to pay attention to how we interact with food. We don’t need to change anything, we don’t need to judge ourselves, we don’t need to beat ourselves up – we just need to pay attention. Pay attention so that we can try and understand why we interact with food the way that we do. That is all we need to do for now. Once that awareness is there, that is when we can start to shift. That is when we can start to see food for what it really is – nourishment – and start to see what is really happening inside of us.

This is not easy – it is scary, because whether we mean to or not we have created a space where our interactions with food, our obsession with it, it is a comfort from what else is happening.  Deep breathes. This can be scary. This can be anxiety inducing. You are not alone. Support is always here. Be gentle with yourself. We need food to survive – but why do you need food right? Beyond physical survival – what else do you need it for? That is the place to start – with the gentle questions – no judgement, no repercussions – just curiosity – why do you need food?

xx

Alex

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Food Stress?!?!

Is it an eating disorder or just normal food stress? That is the question. Many people have a preoccupation with food, but would never consider it an eating disorder. Maybe because it doesn’t fit the diagnostic criteria of an eating disorder. Maybe because it doesn’t seem severe enough. Maybe because this preoccupation or focus on food is just “normal” food stress.

The truth is there is no normal food stress.

Food is not supposed to be complicated or hard or stressful. It is not supposed to be something that fills our days and our thoughts. It is not supposed to make us feel emotionally bad EVER.

Yes there are foods that impact our bodies in certain ways that can give rise to physical symptoms, BUT those are very different from the emotional guilt and stress that surrounds eating certain foods for many people.

Food is our sustenance, nourishment and social connection. It is to be eaten and enjoyed so that we have energy to live; energy to make it through the day; energy to survive.

Along the way, as we have evolved as humans, this fundamental value of what food is has gotten lost. Instead it has been replaced by diet culture. The obsession with thinness and fitness and health and the “right” diet has led to food becoming something that we should scrutinize, avoid, manipulate. It has become something that we use to avoid emotional pain. Over eating, under eating, obsessive healthy eating, eating junk food, thinking about food all of the time; these are all ways that food has become a tool in our lives instead of sustenance.  

Food is no longer seen as the fundamental nourishment that it is.

Instead it has become acceptable to use food as a coping mechanism, a distraction, a place to direct our stress and overwhelm. That can manifest in different obsessions and actions depending on the person.

While it may not be an overt eating disorder – many of us are using food as a tool to help us cope with our lives and what is happening in this. This is creating an entire society with an extremely complicated relationship with food. 

It does not have to be this way.

Part of understanding this complex and emotional relationship we have with food is for each of us to understand what is going on with ourselves. What underneath our day-to-day actions makes us need to use food in the ways that we are. What is safe about thinking about food versus thinking about other things? What does engaging with food offer us amidst the complexity of the world and of our emotions? This is something that all of use can take time to reflect on.

Underneath the preoccupation with food there might be something that we need help and support navigating. You don’t have to have an overt eating disorder to have thoughts, obsessions, guilt, dysfunctions, stress, or just an overall complicated relationship with food. It is the norm these days. But it doesn’t have to be.

Food is not meant to be hard. Remember that when you find food taking over your thoughts. Food is supposed to give you energy instead of taking it away. If you are finding that thinking about or engaging with food is taking more energy than it should – there is always support to help navigate it. Never hesitate to reach out – eating disorder or not. I am here to help you look beyond the food and figure out how to best support and nourish your body both emotionally and physically.

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How to get by

In life there are some horribly painful things. There are events, relationships, and emotions that are too difficult for us to deal with in that moment.  So we find ways to cope with them. It could be watching a movie, writing in a journal, going for a walk, or having a bubble bath. These are each small things that distract us momentarily from the pain. They give us some relief, renewed strength and often help us to move forward, past the pain and hurt. In a sense these coping strategies protect us from harm and keep us from getting overwhelmed. They can be very effective in helping us stay sane.

But what happens when life itself is what causes the pain. When it isn’t one event or moment or relationship, but the unpredictability and discomfort of life itself that makes us hurt. What happens when our small coping strategies are not enough, when life becomes too hard and overwhelming that they are no longer enough of a distraction. What happens is we find new ways of coping. Maybe it is alcohol, maybe exercise, maybe drugs, maybe work, maybe food or maybe sex. These are coping strategies that can consume more of our time and energy so that we don’t have to be fully in life. Whether you have an eating disorder, an exercise disorder, a drug addiction, a sex addiction or you are a work-a-holic, it doesn’t matter. Underneath each disorder we are all the same. We are all the same. We each use our own disorder to help keep us safe on our whirlwind adventure through life. These coping strategies protect us when life gets to be too much.

At the same time that they are protective, each disorder is equally destructive. They each take us away from the present moment and our strong emotions so that we can feel “better”. But in reality they don’t make us feel “better” they make us feel nothing. If we constantly focus on food or exercise or work or drugs then there is no time to be in life; no time to pay attention to our fears; no time to feel love or be loved.

The truth is that these coping strategies can not help us in the long run. Instead they destroy us. They wear us down from the inside out. Some more clearly than others. Drugs can destroy us instantly. Their effects are immediately visible. Exercise and work can be just as destructive. They wear you down slowly until you are exhausted. Each of these coping strategies break you down until the lines that define you as a person are blurred. Instead people become defined by their work or exercise or drug of choice. To the world you become your coping strategy. You become so lost in it and so consumed by it that it defines your life. It becomes impossible to imagine your life without it. Impossible to imagine your day without alcohol, without running, with food.

Society sees each disorder differently. Alcoholics, work-a-holics, people with eating disorders, runners and sex addicts are all judged based on the coping strategy they indulge in. Each one has there own stigma associated with it. But the thing that is so often overlooked is that underneath each disorder is the same human. A human that is scared, overwhelmed and trying to make it through each day on this Earth. It doesn’t matter what method we choose to help us cope, the purpose of each coping strategy is the same.

The idea is not to judge someone for their disorder, but to find compassion for them. Look at yourself. Look at your fears and how you find a way to manage them. Each disorder stems from the same origin of fear. Someone can be addicted to drugs the same way someone can be addicted to running, as an attempt to find “peace” and “safety”. It is not logical, but a desperate attempt to stay sane in a world that is so confusing. What’s ironic is that our attempts to stay sane actually make us go INSANE. Having compassion for yourself and others struggling with any type of disorder is the only way to take steps to get out away from the hold of a destructive coping mechanism. Replacing it with another “disorder” (such as replacing drugs with work) may be initially less harmful, but it does not solve the underlying reason for the disorder. Looking beneath the layers of the coping strategy is the only way to beat it. And that takes compassion; compassion and ALOT of hard work.

It is not impossible to transcend these feelings, actions and reactions. Naturopathic Medicine may be a way that can support you on your journey to healing. Whether it is or isn’t remember that you are not alone and you are NOT your coping strategy. You are YOU – a strong, caring, independent, perfect human being.

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Beyond Food: Eating Disorder Awareness Week

Because in my mind I am not okay

Eating disorders are one of the most complex and challenging illnesses to both treat and experience. They can be close to invisible, hidden by a “healthy” looking exterior of perceived calm and collection or they can be as evident as an emaciated human being.

Types of eating disorders:

Anorexia nervosa: Anorexia is an eating disorder that is characterized by a refusal to maintain a normal body weight (usually less than 85% of expected body weight), intense fear of gaining weight, as well as a disturbance in experience of one’s body shape or weight. This can be either restrictive, which involves not eating or binge-eating and purging, which involves large amount of food and then purging it out of the body in some way. This also has an increased influence on one’s body image and self-evaluation.

Bulimia nervosa: Bulimia is an eating disorder that is characterized by recurrent binge eating over a specific period of time that feels as though there is a sense of lack of control. After this binge eating there is often a recurrent, inappropriate compensatory behaviour such as vomiting that gets rid of the food that has just been ingested. This also has an increased influence on one’s body image and self-evaluation.

Binge eating disorder: binge eating disorder is very similar to bulimia however without the purging or compensatory behaviour. It is characterized by episodes of eating large quantities of food in a short period of time with a sense of lack of control over this. It is often followed up an experience of shame, distress or guilt following the food eating episodes as well as the feeling of being uncomfortably full. This also has an increased influence on one’s body image and self-evaluation.

Orthorexia: A form of fixation with food that resolves around obsession for proper nutrition resulting in a restrictive diet, a focus on food preparation and ritualized patters of eating. This is often has an obsession with food quality or nutrition leading to much of their mental and physical energy going towards thinking about food so much so that it interferes with daily life.

February 1st marks the beginning of eating disorder awareness week.  While this is a week that specifically works to bring to attention to struggles of those with diagnosed eating disorders, it also asks each and every one of us to evaluate our own relationship with food and hunger. Food is something that is so tied with human emotion, and human experience that it can become a method that we use to cope without even realizing it. Whether it is emotionally eating, emotionally not eating, choosing junk food when we feel bad or refusing to touch unhealthy food when we feel bad, our ways of interacting with food are often based on how we feel emotionally instead of looking at what our body needs. In this sense each of us engage in disordered eating patterns at some point or another.

The truth about food is that it is our nourishment. It is what our body needs to survive each and every day. We MUST have food every day. This is what can make eating disorders so incredibly painful for the person who suffers from them. Unlike other addiction such as drug addiction or alcoholism, a person with an eating disorder cannot avoid the trigger of all of their mental and physical pain. They have to eat. No matter how much pain it causes them – they have to eat.

For most people if there is something that hurts them –they don’t’ do it. For example when you touch a hot element on a stove, it burns and causes pain in the area that touches the element. In order to avoid this pain you take caution when you are using the elements and try not to touch the element whenever possible. For someone with an eating disorder it is eating food that causes this similar sensation of mental, emotional and physical pain in their entire being. The thing is they can’t stop eating food. This makes it incredibly challenging to recover from an eating disorder. At the same time that you are trying to work through all of the things underlying the disorder such as anxiety, depression, OCD, past traumas etc. you are continuously being triggered.  Can you imagine trying to heal that burned hand if you are constantly being forced to place it back on the hot element? It takes incredibly hard work and time and strength to overcome this trigger and truly start to heal.

This is the type of resilience that characterizes people who are in recovery or who have recovered from an eating disorder.

This is what eating disorder awareness week is all about. It is about recognizing the complexity and the challenge that comes with trying to overcome an eating disorder. It is about recognizing that recovery does not stop when someone is at an appropriate weight – instead it is a constant struggle each and every day on the inside. It involves overcoming certain thought patterns and core beliefs that are so ingrained that they feel true. It involves going beyond food and learning about who you are beneath this disorder. It is about healing all of the parts of  the self that have been hurt, fragmented, broken. It is about looking at all of the parts of the self that are scared, anxious, depressed, traumatized, alone and working with them to create safety in this world. It is about finding a way that each and every person with an eating disorder can feel safe in the world so that they do not need to hold onto their eating disorder to feel okay.  It takes time. It takes strength. It takes patience. More than anything it takes support, no matter how long it has been, no matter how long it will take. There is no right way to recover from an eating disorder, no right treatment. It is about working with each individual, to support them the best way possible, no matter what that support looks like.

Naturopathic Medicine is one of the many tools that can support those who are trying to recover from an eating disorder. The many modalities that Naturopathic Medicine encompasses including mind-body counselling, acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, homeopathy, and nutrition are all tools that can support someone with an eating disorder. No matter what direction your recovery is going, never be afraid to reach out for support with me, Dr. Alexandra.

Remember that you are not alone in this. Support for eating disorders is available through Naturopathic Medicine and may other tools. I am always sending so much love and support. Hang in there.

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The winds of change

Change: the unpredictable journey through uncertainty

There is one thing that we as human beings know and that is that life is full of uncertainty. As much as we as we try and create a path – a system – of how our journey through life is “supposed” to go, it is close to impossible for life to turn out the way that we expect.

Life is all about change. It starts when we leave our mother’s womb and enter into this new environment on Earth. After that, each year as we grow older and develop, aspects of our lives begin to change. These include things such as what grade we are in, what school we go to, what we are studying, who we live with, what job we are in, what our most important relationships are, how we cope daily and the list goes on. These changes can be exciting, but can also be sources of extreme anxiety and fear.  This can make change particular challenging for people to undertake and to cope with.

What is so derailing about change?

It is terrifying because it is new, it is different and it is unknown. Change can be great or it can be the opposite. The hard part about change is that it is impossible to know what things will be like on the other side. There is no way to know what change will bring. It is a concept in life that is characterized by extreme uncertainty and for anyone who likes order, routine, and certainty change is terrifying. We can spend hours thinking about all of the different paths that change can lead us on. We can obsess about what our lives will look like when we undertake change and transition – but in the end there is no way to know.

The only thing to do is to just jump right in and see what happens. And that is hard.

There is a reason why people like to do the same things for their entire lives. If they work the same job and live in the same area and socialize with the same people, then more or less they will always know what to expect. There is a sense of safety in what we know, in our routine. This sense of safety and “knowing” makes us feel like we are keeping our lives manageable when they have the potential to be volatile. The less risks we take, the less chance that disaster or the unexpected could happen. The more comfortable we are, the easier it can feel to cope with life’s challenges.

Then again, this same comfort keeps us from experiencing what life has to offer. Our world is versatile and exceptional for a reason. It is meant to be experienced. It is meant to be seen. If we stay comfortable for our whole lives, if we stay stuck in what we know, then we don’t actually live. We never get the chance to experience the world. We are meant to live. That is why change will always find us.

Change tests us. It tests the way that we interact with the world –the way that we cope. It makes us shift things up. It makes us question the things that we do on a daily basis. It makes us re-evaluate how we cope with our mental and physical states on a daily basis. Change makes us change how we cope. When we are forced to abandon our routines; our coping strategies, things that we have bottled up inside and chosen not to feel, whether in the present or the past can start to arise. These can be things that are both physical, mental or emotional such as pain, grief, stress, overwhelm, fear, panic etc.

Daily routines can help us cope with unwanted emotions or physical sensations that we don’t want to face. It helps to mask them from our minds so that it makes it easier to accomplish what we need to do. We can use routine to suppress thoughts from our minds, but our body will always remembers. Bodies remember the emotions that our minds refuse to feel and the messages that our soul is trying to share with us that our minds refuse to hear. When we don’t let these soul messages enter our minds, they don’t disappear. Instead they still come to the surface only through our feelings and physical bodies instead of our thoughts. It could be exhaustion, it could be a pit in the stomach, it could be aches or pain or nervousness or anxiety, but some way or another our soul will still be heard. The things we are trying to avoid feeling will always make themselves known in some way. Often it is a change in routine that will bring them to the surface.

Change will always come. Sometimes we must make it ourselves and other times it will find us. Either way we can only accept the inevitability of change. The same way we accept that people are born and will die or that the leaves of trees will change colour with the seasons, as a part of life. To fight change is to fight life. To avoid change is to avoid living. That doesn’t make change any less terrifying. That doesn’t make change any less hard. But change is a part of nature. It is our way to grow as human beings; our way to experience all that life has to offer. It makes us face things stored up inside us that are hidden by routine. By trying to accept and embrace change we can try and make it easier for ourselves by decreasing the inner turmoil that accompanies the change. It won’t necessarily make the physical act of change easier, but at least it is an attempt to decrease the disruption within us the change can cause.  

As Abraham Maslow said “you will either step forward into growth or you will step backward into safety”. Neither is right or wrong.

Sending all the love on whatever path your life takes you today

xo Alexandra  

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It is okay to not be okay.

To anyone struggling with mental illness and to all of us struggling to deal with our own minds day in and day out,

I know there isn't anything we can say to take the pain away, but now more than ever we can be there to SUPPORT each other. ALWAYS remember that you are never alone. No matter how terrible things are there are people who care deeply and who understand the pain that comes with grappling with your own thoughts and emotions. The same way families, friends and practitioners support each other through physical illness they CAN support each other through mental and emotional illness. Despite how isolating mental illness can be, there is so much HOPE for each and everyone of us. Never stop fighting.

 

The hardest thing in the world to feel is blackness. It is a physical sensation that encompasses the entire body. It hides all love, hope, happiness and connection. It replaces it with hopelessness, unworthiness and darkness. In the blackness nothing matters. Everything seems unimportant: life, love, and connection all mean nothing. It all feels like a never ending put of doom and despair.

 

The blackness encompasses every bodily sensation. It takes over emotions and replaces all good emotions with negative one. It takes over the physical. It is like a shadow gliding over the inside of the whole body. It makes you feel heavy and like you are being slowly crushed by an overwhelming sense of despair. It zaps every ounce of strength and energy in your body. It makes it feel as if there is nothing good in the entire world.

 

The blackness hides your soul. It hides your essence, the part of yourself that could help you to remember that there is more to life than blackness. By shadowing your essence it makes it so much harder for you to escape this sensation. The essence holds the love, your love and your strength. When that energy is hidden from view it is so much easier for the hopelessness and despair to take over. It makes it so much harder to overcome the blackness.

 

The blackness acts like a knife, cutting you off from reality. It is hard to connect with people or be present in the blackness because it those moments, it feels like there is nothing else.. It is like drowning in the world, unable to feel or experience anything as it happens around you.

 

If someone hasn’t experienced this sensation it is difficult to understand it. It does not make logical sense. You can’t just tell someone in the blackness to be happy. There is so much more then the blackness then just happiness or sadness.

 

It takes a special type of connection with oneself and one’s surroundings to be able to let in any light. It takes a special type of strength to feel the blackness and fight to see the light. It takes a special kind of strength to recognize you are drowning and choose to fight to get to the surface.

 

This strength cannot be described. It is a feeling. Some days it is accessible and some days it seems that you will never be able to find it again. This strength can allow us to overcome anything in our lives: the worst experiences, the most pain and the most hurtful rejection. This strength is what lets us survive when we know that we can’t on our own. This strength is our best friend. It is always there when we need it. We all have it. I promise. It is often hidden, so hidden that we don’t even know it is there. But just because you can’t feel or see something that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

 

Support is available everyday from friends, family, healthcare practitioners, hospitals, private and public treatment centers, help telephone lines. It may feel like we are alone when living with our own mental health but I PROMISE that no matter how alone you feel you are NEVER truly alone.

 

Sending all the love and hope and strength xx