The Truth About Comfort Food

The TRUTH About Comfort Food

Comfort food is actually about the need or the wish to be comforted by another person.  If nobody is available to provide comfort, or if the people in your life are not able to respond in a way that feels good, that’s painful.  The good news is that you can learn to give yourself what you need to feel better.

If you’re turning to food for comfort, the primary challenge is learning to respond to yourself with language instead of action (eating).

If you turn away from food as a way of feeling better, you’ve learned to respond to your needs by ignoring, denying or judging them.  It’s humiliating to have unmet needs, and you may have turned against your need for comfort as a way to feel powerful, turning passive to active. 

You cannot stuff down your feelings, nor can you starve them away or purge them.  Cultivating an ability to recognize, value and respond to yourself without bingeing, restricting or purging will help you overcome eating disorder behavior, no matter what your struggle with food.

Keep in mind the acronym VARY as a guide to providing comfort:

Validate:  Recognize that your feelings and thoughts are reactions to a particular situation, and you have an absolute right to feel the way you feel. 

For example:  I got passed over for a promotion at work and my co-worker got it instead. I feel hurt, unappreciated and upset.  Of course I feel that way.  How else could I feel given, this situation? 

Acknowledge:  Accept the existence and truth of what you’re feeling.

This is a painful, upsetting, and humiliation situation. I also realize that some of my sibling issues might have gotten stirred up, since my brother was always getting special treatment.

Reassure:  Encourage and inspire yourself by remembering that this situation will pass, and you will feel better.  Keep in mind past situations in which you were able to overcome difficulty.  You will this time, too!

I’ve overcome a lot of challenges in my life (recall them specifically) and I’m going to get past this, too.  I feel awful now, but I’m not going to be stuck in this horrible feeling.  I will feel better

Yourself!

When you are consistently respond to yourself in a supportive way, you feel better.  You may even feel good.  When that happens, you don’t use food to comfort, numb or distract yourself.  That’s how you make peace with food for good!   

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Feeling Out Of Control?

FEELING OUT OF CONTROL?

“I was totally out of control with ice cream last week.”

“I didn’t eat anything all day and felt completely in control.”

“I hate getting mad because I feel so out of control.”

If you are struggling with disordered eating, the very thing you are trying to control (food, weight, and so forth) is actually controlling you.

Often, controlling food is a response to feelings of powerlessness in other areas of your life.   It’s easier to focus on your intake of food or your weight than to deal with an unpredictable boss, teacher, significant other or friend.  The wish to manage a person or situation morphs into a wish to control your food.  You can’t control a person but you can ostensibly control yourself, turning a relational struggle into an internal conflict.

Control is also a way of protecting yourself from feelings of vulnerability. Being vulnerable is often experienced as being unprotected from potential (or probable) emotional pain.   Taking control feels active and is a solution to the passivity of vulnerability.

Conflicts with food may symbolize conflicts about wanting or needing “more” in life.  Controlling your portions can be a way of denying your needs and wants for more.  Bingeing and purging may be a way of expressing your conflict over a wish for more.

Food for thought:

What parts of your life make you feel powerless?  Powerful?

Who is (or was) the most controlling person in your life?

What do you associate with weakness?

What are you afraid will happen if you lose control of your emotions?

Have you ever “lost it” emotionally?  What were the consequences? 

What are your fears about opening up to other people?

Where did you learn to be guarded?

What do you want more of in your life?  What's it like to think about wanting more?

When you identify and process the underlying emotions that lead to disordered eating, you won't rely on disordered eating to cope.   And that's how you make peace with food!!

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Being vs. Doing

We’re human beings, not human doings!

Our society values productivity and accomplishment. If you grow up in a family (and a culture) that is primarily or solely interested in what you're doing, accomplishing and achieving, you learn to value yourself by being productive; it becomes the basis of self-esteem. 

When others express interest only in your accomplishments, you learn to value yourself only for what you have achieved.  When others dismiss or devalue your feelings, you learn to do the same.  Feelings become frightening and a source of anxiety. Disordered eating is a way of coping with those feelings.  So is staying busy and focused on achievements.

Doing can serve as a distraction from your emotions.  It can take the form of:

*Working all the time

*Going online all the time

*Going to the gym

*Running errands

*Having the TV on all the time

*Going out and seeing friends all the time

*Thinking about what you need to do next/making lists

*Thinking about calories, fat grams, the number on the scale

Being puts you in touch with your emotions.   It looks like this:

*Being alone

*Staying aware of  thoughts and feelings

*Comforting and soothing yourself with words

*Relaxing

How do you keep busy?

How did you learn to use “doing” to escape “feeling”?

What happens if you are alone with yourself?

What are you afraid you might think?

What are you afraid you might feel?

When you can "be" with yourself and process any feelings or conflicts you might experience, you are less vulnerable to turning to (or from) food to distract yourself from those uncomfortable states.

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Guilt Trip? For shame!

GUILT & SHAME

"Guilt is a rope that wears thin."

                   -Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“We need never be ashamed of our tears.” 
                  ― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Disordered eating can distract you from intolerable emotions and conflicts.  It's easier to focus on food/weight/behavior than to experience difficult thoughts and feelings. Feeling guilty or ashamed for what you’re eating (or not eating) or how much you weigh can be a distraction from a deeper sense of guilt and/or shame about your needs, wants, and core self.

GUILT can be understood as being about something that you did or did not do.  It references behavior and actions.   People feel guilty when they think they’ve done something wrong, or when they choose not to take action.   Guilt sounds like:  “I’ve done something really bad and wrong.”

SHAME is about who you are as a person, your essential character.   It’s not that you’ve done a bad thing, but that there’s something essentially bad about you.  Shame is often associated with secrecy and leads to isolation.Shame sounds like:  “There’s something really bad and wrong with me.”

Understanding your behavior around food (or anything) can help mitigate the feelings about the behavior and make you feel less guilty and shameful.  

Think of something that makes you feel guilt and/or shame.  What is your “crime”?

(ie, “I feel guilty for eating that pizza” or “I feel guilty for wanting ice cream”)

What does the behavior mean about you?

(ie, “I want too much and I have no self-control.  I am completely weak.”)

What is another way of looking at this situation and your behavior? 

(ie, “I have conflicts about wanting more out of life, and that makes me feel needy.  Wanting more is not bad, or shameful, but human.  I will be curious about where in my life I feel deprived, so I don’t turn to food to get “more” or to express my conflict over wanting more out of life by eating more or bingeing and purging, or by restricting.”)

If you feel guilty about eating too much, or restricting, or bingeing and purging, ask yourself what you feel guilty about that has nothing to do with food.   If your guilt is not attached to food/weight, what might you feel guilty about?  

If you feel a pervasive sense of shame, a sense that there is something inherently wrong with you, what is so bad about you?  

What do you imagine is wrong with your character, your basic and essential self?

Where did you learn to relate to yourself this way?  

When you identify and process your core guilt and shame, you’ll be less likely to express those emotions through disordered eating. 

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