I realize Valentine ‘s Day was last week, but the love needs to last longer than one day.
Stress relief is the most elusive component of Lifestyle Therapy. Love, particularly self-love is an important part of that.
This is a term that often makes people squeamish, so let me clarify that self-love is not selfishness. It is a healthy kind of love where you are esteeming and treating yourself to be as important as anyone else around you. It is being kind, compassionate, and patient with yourself, just like you would with anyone that you care about.
As a clinician what I see is that this is an area that people often struggle with and can be the source of self-sabotage when self-love is lacking.
Over eating can often be linked with feelings of inadequacy. It can also be used as a source of comfort, or subconsciously to create a cushion or a wall around someone for protection. This is a common and natural instinct for anyone who has suffered physical or emotional trauma. It ‘s no coincidence that 70% of obese people experienced childhood trauma.
Embracing and nurturing self-love can help one feel safe enough, and valuable enough that they simply don ‘t need the excess food.
On the flip side, we can use food to justify feelings unworthiness. We all have ups and downs, and moments where negative beliefs we’ve taken on can weigh on us. Negative self-talk like, “I’m ugly”, “I’m a slob”, “No one would want me” can promote over eating to contribute to subconscious efforts to fulfill those negative, false beliefs.
Compassion for ones self and seeing our differences as endearing and interesting is important to being able to set aside self-defeating actions like over-eating. Being willing to be with yourself, even when you feel lousy and negative beliefs may be yelling inside, is a wonderful act of love and friendship towards oneself. If you can stand it, you ‘ll find that you may actually like yourself, and you ‘re not so bad after all… the next step would be to recognize and be willing to be ok with that.
One of the ways I see this unhealthy cycle manifest is when people blow their nutrition program and beat themselves up so badly inside that they feel like a failure, “what ‘s the point” or even want to punish themselves. This results in eating even more and making things worse. Imagine if a child ate a cupcake they shouldn’t have and to punish them you made them eat 30 cupcakes until the were in pain and sick. That is abuse. When a person beats themselves up inside and does things even as simple as intentionally over eating, they are treating themselves in an abusive manner, which NEVER helps with the success of their nutrition or health program.
The most important thing to do when you’ve messed up is to dust off, tell yourself you are sorry and forgive yourself. Take a moment to reflect on what your basic emotional need was that led you to use food as a strategy to meet that need. If we can just get in touch with what is going on inside, often we can find a much more fulfilling and healthy solution. If we are effectively meeting our emotional needs in healthy ways, we don’t need excess food, we feel more in control and life becomes easier.
Here at Bliss Lifestyle Therapies, we use brainspotting as a powerful tool to help you heal trauma, and rewrite negative beliefs into good ones so you can more easily enjoy the life that you want; and Emotion Code to relieve people of trapped emotions that may be making things harder than necessary.
The bottom line is you ‘re going to exercise more, eat better, allow yourself to rest when you need it, and simply take far better care of your health the more that you love yourself.
There’s even a bonus… the more care and compassion you can treat yourself with, it ‘s like earning super powers that allow you to almost magically be able to have more compassion and caring for others around you. No matter how much you think you love someone, you are never treating them any better than you would treat yourself in your best moments. You won ‘t be able to see or feel how much better you can love someone until you get better at loving in general which absolutely starts with, and includes YOU. ♥️
