Emotional Eating and the Nature of Indulgence

I’d been dating a wonderful woman for a few months when she shared with me her struggle around emotional eating and strategies she had been using to deal with it in her life. Instead of emotional eating, she tried to regularly practice other ways of caring for her emotional needs: taking a bath, conversing with a loved one, doing something creative, getting enough sleep, cleaning the kitchen, listening to music, taking a walk, laughing with her kids… This stimulated in me the following response, which in retrospect is a great example of what I mean when I talk about self-inquiry.


Thank you for this. Reading this I have many thoughts and feelings about how emotional eating has been present in my life – all the way back to when I was 11. Eating and food (and relationship to body and self-image) is such a huge confusion in our culture, and I certainly do not feel that I am totally free from it. 

I am also thinking of our texting about indulgence earlier – so I wanted to start with the dictionary as a way to understand it better:

It comes from the Latin indulgere meaning “to give free rein to”

to yield to the desire of :  “please indulge me for a moment”
to treat with excessive leniency, generosity, or consideration
to take unrestrained pleasure in

to allow oneself to enjoy the pleasure of

to become involved in (an activity, typically one that is undesirable or disapproved of)

(in the Roman Catholic Church) a grant by the Pope of remission of the temporal punishment in purgatory still due for sins after absolution. The unrestricted sale of indulgences by pardoners was a widespread abuse during the later Middle Ages.

I still see in myself a judgement around food and indulgence and the different ways that I have dealt with myself and others in my life around it. Lately, for whatever reason, I feel freer in myself about it, mostly because at a certain point overeating stopped meeting my emotional need. I have definitely tried diets and being more intentional about food and everything and honestly it didn’t really help. So what I am left with now is the question: what is the nature of the need that emotional eating addresses? I can identify the basic need to feel good in my body and enjoy the pleasant sensations of the food itself. This seems like a normal thing. Where it becomes emotional is when it is a substitute for other kinds of connection like you identified above. But also there is this craving (which I feel is a little bit of a loaded word) for something deeper. I guess I would call it a yearning, for deeper connection to all of these super positive things – positive anticipation, arousal, enjoyment, ease, fulfillment, satisfaction,  gratification, a sense of completion and contentment – and a deep connection to all of life. And when I read what I just wrote I think of one thing: sex. For me, sex is the top activity that connects me to all these things. And that is a completely wonderful thing.

So in my meandering way I think I’ve found the point that is trying to emerge for me and that is: what if we think of eating as a way to connect to all of those good things, not as a compensation or shameful habit but as a reflection of the yearning we all feel for that deep connection to life and ourselves. When I think of that and eating, I feel like there is a more moment-to-moment connection with the sensations and emotional currents of the activity – and I am no longer disconnected from that underlying need. When I am easy with myself in this way, the choice of how and what to eat next is no longer really a choice, because I am in touch with what it is for me in that very moment, and trusting that when I am present with my thoughts and feelings and sensations, an emergent and creative response or action will arise. And in that moment I am free from all the shame, guilt, anxiety and social conditioning around what I should do, and how it will affect my body, and my self image, and how other people see me. Not that these things don’t exist or don’t have a powerful reality, but that even in the face of that, this connection that I feel, this trust, allows me the freedom to accept myself just as I am. 

I guess another thing that occurs to me (and this goes with your list of alternatives) is that if you take good care of your whole self, these things tend to work themselves out in certain unexpected ways. And as you know, I am a big fan of breaking habits – mostly because having that intention around a habit tends to bring the unconscious motivation to the fore, and leads to greater self-knowledge.

With Love,
Albee
June 5, 2022