I had an amazing conversation with one of my coaching clients this past Monday. She came to our phone session very excited to tell me about something new that happened to her this past weekend. (I share this story, and her writing, with her permission.)
She told me that she was at work over the weekend. No one else was in the office when she noticed an open bag of Dove Chocolates…the individually wrapped chocolates had spilled out of the bag onto a person’s desk. As soon as she saw the chocolates those old, familiar, rapid and compulsive eating thoughts began.
“No one would know if I take one.”
“It’s not my chocolate, but I’m sure they would give me one if I had asked.”
She had a piece of chocolate in her hand. The bargaining began.
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“I wonder how many calories are in one. 44.”
“Will I really savor it, or will it make me want 3 more?”
“Then I put the chocolate back. FREEDOM. I chose not to eat the chocolate. I decided for myself whether I wanted it or not. The chocolate did not choose for me! Would eating the chocolate be bad… would not eating it be evidence I was a good girl and used self-control? No! Eating chocolate is not bad. I am not good or bad. It’s MY life. I chose what I wanted in that moment. I was in control of my life.”
I encouraged her to write more about how she felt about her choice that day. Here’s what she wrote…
“Freedom feels better than the comfort food brings me. Freedom feels better than the safe place of familiarity that I find when I’m spiraling down. Being free is more work, more words, more concentration, harder. It’s a narrower path. But it’s the path I choose. It’s not the big, wide, easy path that has swept me away and down in the past, caught in the crowd of easy, where it feels like decisions are made for me…where life just happens to me and eventually it leads to unhappiness, pain, and frustration.”
This is what recovery from emotional eating looks like…and feels like. It’s not a perfect recovery. She, just as I do, will sometimes choose to turn to chocolate to take care of an emotional need (or to just enjoy a piece or two of chocolate). But today that feels like a choice rather than the beginning of that old familiar downward spiral. She and I, and so many others who are doing this mindful recovery work, understand that this work is not about food. We no longer choose to allow a piece of chocolate, even when it apears in our lives unexpectedly, to lead to feeling “out of control”. If we choose to eat it, it is a choice that does not make us “good or bad”, or make us feel “good or bad”. Today we feel empowered to create the lives we say we want…
If you’re not there, yet, how can you get there? Are you reading and engaging in the suggested action steps in your 52 Weekly Empowerment Tools, Tips, and Lessons? Have you made a notebook and created a new ritual around reading the Tools in it? Are you regularly using the “A Weigh Out Empowerment Network” Groups and Forums to connect with and share your thoughts and feelings with others? When emotional eaters get their feelings up and out and expressed, they don’t have to stuff them down with “food thoughts” and food. If you think it would be helpful, have you considered working with one of our Coaches or with a therapist in your own community? Recovery is possible…help is here in the Circle and elsewhere…simply take a risk and reach for it! You can create the life you were truly meant to live!
Ellen Shuman is a Life Coach who specializes in working with people who struggle with emotional and binge eating issues. She is the founder of A Weigh Out & Acoria Eating Disorder Treatment, Vice President of the Binge Eating Disorder Association (BEDA), and Co-Chair of the Academy for Eating Disorders Special Interest Group on “Health at Every Size”,ellen@aweighout.com
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