Your Emotions, they drive you, they motivate you, they direct you and inspire you. But they also bring you down, wear you down, make you want to crawl into a ball, hibernate, and not face the world. And for many of us, our eating behaviour is matched with our feelings. When we are happy, we eat, when we are sad, we eat, when we are anxious, we eat and so on. So, what does it mean then that we eat our feelings? And our feelings eat us?

Wherever we look these days food is being glamorised. Celebrity chefs post beautiful images of their creations on Facebook, Instagram and their websites and even those not so celebrity cooks seem to post their creations. Television, magazines, even our Coles and Woollies catalogues have made their food look more enticing with beautiful words and pictures. And added to this are your thoughts, and memories around food. If memories of happy times around food seem to run in your mind, food is associated with fun, pleasure and comfort. After stressful and challenging days, food will be the answer, your mind and body remember. It is unconscious and automatic.

To be honest, and you won’t like what I have to say, so brace yourself, you don’t “love’” food. You are in love with the idea of what you believe food does for you. You are in love with brain connections, neural pathways made when you learned to connect and associate the positive feeling of warmth, comfort, connection, and happiness with food. It is that okayness that you are craving and yearning for when you reach for the stash of chocolate or packet of biscuits.

Food has power. Food is given this sense of powerful ability to make everything ok. To make you feel loved, comforted, less lonely, less stressed, less tired, less overwhelmed, and so on. Wow, amazing abilities from an inanimate object or objects. And what is worse, food in all its forms, has no ability to feel, to love, to show love, nothing, nada, nil. Yet we give it that power. So much expectation. So, so much.

In essence, what you are really doing is handing over your power to an object or objects that remains at the mercy of your choices. If we really take power and start to make a move. Move back into our body. Embody. Listen to our body and its messages. We realise it is not our stomach that is empty, it is not our stomach that needs refuelling. It is something much deeper. But in order to fuel that, in order to start hearing that message, we need to make that transition back into our body and listen to our soul.

So instead of using food to numb our feelings or repress our feelings, or to fill a void, it is about opening up to that emptiness. Move into it. Explore it. Look for what it is you are really feeling and wanting. The answer is not in the fridge or the pantry.