Soothe Without Food

 We all have those moments: someone cuts you off in traffic, your find your significant other has left a huge mess at home, or you got in a pickle at work. Whatever level of distress you are experiencing, your automatic reaction may be to head to the refrigerator or cabinet and start cramming food into your mouth. For years, this has been your pattern, and for years you have made yourself feel sick from overeating. Yet you still use food as your coping mechanism for dealing with stress, anger, anxiety, sadness, and just about any emotion. There is a basis for why you do this. Food can act like a drug. Studies have shown that sugar can elicit the same chemical response in the brain as heroin does; both light up the pleasure pathways in our brains.

It makes sense that when we experience something stressful; we want to make that distress disappear. Thus, we reach for what we know works. Let’s be honest though, this is not working, and it is time to find a new set of coping skills. Maybe you’ve gained weight, your self-esteem has decreased, or perhaps compulsive eating is having a negative effect on your relationship with loved ones. Perhaps you have tried an alternative strategy for dealing with stress, but abandoned this strategy when it didn’t work. What you really need is to have several alternative strategies in your back pocket for those extra tough days.

One alternative to eating is to try a few moments of meditation. Since those who eat compulsively tend to do so in order to self-soothe, they find that when they use meditation to relax and reduce stress and anxiety, they no longer need to use food calm their emotions.

How to meditate instead of eating to soothe:
Start simply. For the next five days, make a commitment to yourself to sit in a comfortable position, and just breathe for five minutes. No rules, no perfection. If it helps to say a mantra in your head, you can repeat the words “I breathe in, I breathe out” or “I inhale, I exhale” or “I breathe in calm, I exhale stress”. Match the length of your inhales to your exhales, and if you find yourself stressing about thoughts that will inevitably distract you, just acknowledge those thoughts, and come back to your breath.

See if after five days, you notice a difference in your energy and anxiety levels. Try posting a note in your kitchen that reminds you to “Just breathe” to intercept you in that moment of temptation when your emotions have you reaching for food.

Eventually, if you enjoy this process, you can increase your meditation time. For now, just enjoy those sacred five minutes of YOU time!