Feeling Your Feelings Instead of Eating Through Them

This month start feeling your feelings on a new level. Experience tools and skills to deepen your ability to experience your needs and help you choose to allow your emotions to surface instead of stuffing them down with food.

Session #1:

Tune into Your Feelings and Food

Identifying Feelings That Make You Want to Eat

Notes for Session #1

What is a feeling?

The dictionary defines feelings as:

  1.     an emotional state or reaction.
  2.     a belief, especially a vague or irrational one.

 

The magazine, Psychology Today, calls them perception of events within the body, closely related to emotion. 

 

Unsurprisingly, people get confused around them because even psychologists disagree on the definition of feelings as they are internal and subjective. 

 

This week, notice which type of feelings impel you to eat without hunger, what your brain believes it is achieving by sending you signals to eat instead of feel, and… if you are ready… sit with an uncomfortable feeling.

 

Your mental health is as important as your physical health.

 

Tap into your resources if you feel unsafe: your friends, family, accountability group, psychologists, and other doctors. If you need to, please call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress for free, or 911 if appropriate. 

Action Steps for Session 1:

NOVICE LEVEL – 

Print out one Identifying Feelings That Make You Want to Eat worksheet. Fill it out with at least 1-2 times you get the signal to eat without hunger. As a stretch goal, comment in the third column after you sit with the feeling. Even if you eat afterward, it will be a success to take at least 5 minutes to feel. Use a timer if it makes you nervous.

As a reminder: Tap into your resources if you feel unsafe: your friends, family, accountability group, psychologists, and other doctors. If you need to, please call 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress for free, or 911 if appropriate. Your mental health is as important as your physical health. If you haven’t allowed yourself to feel in a long time it might be overwhelming. Be kind and compassionate with what surfaces.

INTERMEDIATE LEVEL- Do the novice-level assignment from above at least 3-4 times this week. Sit with feelings at least twice.

ADVANCED LEVEL – Do the assignments above at least 5-6 times, upping the times you sit with feelings.

Report into your accountability group or on our private Facebook’s Friday Check-In post to let everyone know how you did. If you aren’t on Facebook or Marco Polo, email Kate.

Uplevel with listening to an extra podcast or session.

Session 2:

Sensing Your Feelings

Notes for Session #2

Distraction can assist you to overcome a draw toward food but the power move is to invite it in and BE with the feeling.

 

Can you be with a feeling? It’s not going to take you out to sit with it for a little while. Feelings are not tactile. You can’t touch a feeling. It’s just a vibration inside your body, an electromagnetic pulse or charge. 

 

It can make one feel alone to have feelings. They are so individual to you at a particular moment.

 

This week, practice moving into your body and sensing your feelings. I will walk you through it in the video above.

 

You have the courage to try this out. Muster up the strength to be with your feelings. The time and effort will be worth it to live a more holistic life.

Action Steps for Session 2:

NOVICE LEVEL –
Week 1 ~ If you need to, stick with the questions in the Identifying Feelings That Make You Want to Eat worksheet. Over time they will be very powerful to see what you are going to food for. Listed below for your convenience:

  1. What are you feeling? A negative or positive feeling? Can you go deeper to identify happy, sad, tired, or lonely?
  2. What do you THINK food is going to do for you if you eat? Examples: numb, calm, escape, etc.
  3. What actually happens when you sit with this feeling?

INTERMEDIATE LEVEL- Do the novice-level assignment from above and at least 2x this week take time to describe the feeling in your body by answering these questions:

  • Where does the feeling reside? 
  • What does it look like? 
  • What does it feel like? 
  • Is there movement or does it stay stationary? 
  • What message does it have for you?

ADVANCED LEVEL – Do the assignments above at least 3- 5 times this week.

Report into your accountability group or on our private Facebook’s Friday Check-In post to let everyone know how you did. If you aren’t on Facebook or Marco Polo, email Kate.

Session 3:

What does HEALTH look like to you?

Notes for Session #3

Where are you on your health journey?

This week clarify what you are wanting to create in your life in terms of your health. It is something that needs to be revisited as it changes over time.

 

If you haven’t taken yet define what health is for you, how can you determine if you are making progress?

 

Is it possible you could already be stepping into the vibrant health you want by listening to what is going on in your mind and challenging its validity? Sitting with the discomfort you may feel to push through to your goals?

Are you blocking yourself from experiencing positive feelings from all the small steps you take? Do you discount the pride in your accomplishments?

 

WRITING ACTIVITY:
Pull out some paper and concretely write down your current vision of health for yourself. Help your brain define what is healthy for you.

  1. What does health mean to you? Is it movement related? A size? Do you look prettier? Or walk around feeling confident in yourself? Is it physical strength or a number on the scale? It could be a number on a medical test.
  2. What does it look like to be healthy? Slender. Clothes fit easily. Vibrant energy – get up in the morning ready to go, wanting to move, choosing to move, moving easily, happy with your life?
  3. Actions – What are you doing as a healthy person? Is there a practice of health you are involved in? Saying nice things to yourself on purpose? Walking? Practicing mediation?
  4. What is different from now? What is different about your life if you are this “healthy” that excites you? What are you moving towards?

 

Move from the “I gotta” thoughts to thoughts of what you are excited to create for yourself.

 

Spend 5 minutes daily feeling into this image and complimenting yourself at night on any steps you made toward this goal before sleeping. Feel the resistance or other feelings that come up as practiced in weeks 1 and 2.

Action Steps for Session 3:

NOVICE LEVEL – Feel free to stick with any assignment this month. The attention you give to the assignment will bear fruit.
Week 1 ~ Identifying Feelings That Make You Want to Eat worksheet. 

  • What are you feeling? 
  • What do you THINK food is going to do for you if you eat? 
  • What actually happens when you sit with this feeling?

Week 2 ~ Describe the feeling in your body by answering these questions:

  • Where does the feeling reside? 
  • What does it look like? 
  • What does it feel like? 
  • Is there movement or does it stay stationary? 
  • What message does it have for you?

INTERMEDIATE LEVEL- Write down what health means to you while listening to today’s workshop. At least 2-3 times this week, spend 5 minutes upon waking up or while brushing your teeth, to feel the health you are creating. As a stretch goal, before going to sleep, recall 2 things you did to accomplish this goal and give yourself the kudos you deserve. Baby steps are monumentous for the baby. And everyone cheers.

ADVANCED LEVEL – Do the assignments above at least 4- 5 times this week.

Report into your accountability group or on our private Facebook’s Friday Check-In post to let everyone know how you did. If you aren’t on Facebook or Marco Polo, email Kate.

Session 4:

Is Your Feeling Based on a Thought Error?

A Strategy For Feeling the Over-DESIRE For Food

Notes for Session #4

Do you ever wish someone would have modeled how to pass through an unhelpful desire without acting on it?

Today I build on the previous weeks and offer a more in-depth formula for feeling your feelings instead of eating through them. 

Consider answering the questions out loud if you have people in your life that could benefit from hearing this work, even if you are just stumbling through as a beginner. 

It would be a gift for many people to understand how to be with emotions and, also, to realize that there can be thoughts behind the intense desire to run away through food (or their escape of choice).

A Strategy For Feeling
1. Witness it:
Acknowledge there is a  feeling below the desire to eat. Decide if it is a negative or positive emotion …. Or, if you are able, name the emotion.


2. Describe it:
Location. Movement. Use all your five senses if you can.


3. Vibration:
Remind yourself a feeling is a vibration in your body. A small separation from the intensity can help dislodge its hold.

 

4. Cause:
Then ask yourself, what is the thought causing it?

 

5. Truth:
Is that thought valid? Is that a thought you want to be having? Is it helpful? Or is it a Thought Error, like a glitch in your system? Is opening up to the emotion going to help you?

 

6. Observe:
Just notice it. Don’t try and change it. Instead, become curious and say…


“Hmmmm, I wonder why  I’m having the thought. This is a thought error.” Repeat, relax the feeling or intense thought with your breath, and release it from your body. Release its power. 

 

Remember you are not your feelings. You are experiencing the emotion and you are not at the mercy of the feelings you are having. 

It’s optional to feel this or to let it go.

Whether or not you choose to eat afterward you will have done great work on your neural network that keeps you in habit loops of eating based on Thought Errors. Congratulate yourself!

Action Steps for Session 4:

NOVICE LEVEL – Feel free to stick with any assignment this month. The attention you give to the assignment will bear fruit.
Week 1 ~ Identifying Feelings That Make You Want to Eat worksheet. 

  • What are you feeling? 
  • What do you THINK food is going to do for you if you eat? 
  • What actually happens when you sit with this feeling?

Week 2 ~ Describe the feeling in your body by answering these questions:

  • Where does the feeling reside? 
  • What does it look like? 
  • What does it feel like? 
  • Is there movement or does it stay stationary? 
  • What message does it have for you?

Week 3 ~ Write down what health means to you while listening to today’s workshop. At least 2-3 times this week, spend 5 minutes upon waking up or while brushing your teeth, to feel the health you are creating.

 

INTERMEDIATE LEVEL-  Print out the A Strategy For Feeling the Over-DESIRE For Food worksheet. At least 2 times this week, fill it out when you find yourself eating without hunger or feeling a feeling. Celebrate your efforts even if you choose to eat after. This is a game changer!

 

ADVANCED LEVEL – Do the assignments above at least 4- 5 times this week.

Report into your accountability group or on our private Facebook’s Friday Check-In post to let everyone know how you did. If you aren’t on Facebook or Marco Polo, email Kate.

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