Using grounding practices with food to break the cycle of binge eating or emotional eating

Fiona: 00:02

We often think of wellbeing as one-dimensional. What if we look at it from a different perspective?

Josephine: 00:08

The possibilities are endless. All we have to do is step outside the square.

Let's walk this walk together and hold on tight for the ride.

Fiona: 00:16

My name is Fiona. I'm a corporate wellness facilitator, body image and eating psychology coach and a lover of joyful experiences.

Josephine: 00:24

And I'm Josephine, a dietitian, somatic release therapist and a recovering people pleaser and perfectionist.

Fiona and Josephine: 00:30

Welcome to Outside the Square.

Fiona: 00:35

Welcome back, another week.

Josephine: 00:40

I'm really excited, well, we're always excited to come and talk, but today is on emotional eating and binge eating and how to use food to ground ourselves, which is just a topic that we've been so invested with with our clientele for the last 10 years, that, yeah, it's time to start sharing on this.

Fiona: 00:56

Yeah, this, if we're not careful, this could be, you know, the whole podcast. So before we get started, you are going to need a piece of chocolate for today's episode, because we're going to go through a wonderful experience of grounding with food.

So go and find yourself a square of chocolate. If you're in the car, pause this episode, come back when you can sit and have a piece of chocolate next to you, or if you don't like chocolate, little piece of a sweet or a little lolly, I don't know, do you call them lollies? I know in the UK they call them sweets. What do they call them in New Zealand, Josephine?

Josephine: 01:36

Lollies

Fiona: 01:38

Lollies too. Dried fruit, just a little something that you can enjoy and have an experience with because it's going to be transformational.

Josephine: 01:47

I think a really good question to start with Fiona is, is binge eating and emotional eating okay?

Fiona: 01:53

Great question. I love it.

Josephine: 01:55

It's awful in the moment, right? It feels out of control. But yeah, like does it actually damage our health? Is it a big deal? When is it a problem? What's your thought?

Fiona: 02:08

Because I think what we hear a lot, and certainly most of my clients when I first started taking clients from eating psychology, they didn't come for a need to lose weight, I do get weight loss clients, but they came for a need to stop emotionally eating. I'm an emotional eater and I want to learn how to stop, and it's funny because I think the messages that we get say, you know, binge eating is not good for you, emotional eating is not good for you, eating in any other context than perfectly nutritious, healthy, vitamin filled food. Anything that is not chock-a-block full of the most fresh nutrients, you should not be eating and you're a bad person if you do.

That's the message that diet culture gives us and so I think it's normal and natural that we want to get rid of those binge eating and emotional eating cycles, and the way I see it is they can be problematic, so it's important to acknowledge that they can be problematic, but they can also be really useful tools. There's a reason why that experience is happening to you, and it's often because you don't have any other tools at your disposal to deal with what's happening to you. The experience you're going through, the emotions you're feeling, you don't always have other tools to deal with that and so food is a really easy one to be able to get to.

Josephine: 03:51

Yeah, and I always say to my clients, it's also relatively safe. Like, it's, you know, it's not self-harming. It's not alcohol. It's like it is a similar flavour of addiction, but actually it's a relatively safe way to cope with our emotions.

Yes, it feels out of control and yes, there's a time where it takes over your life, but yeah, as far as coping mechanisms go, it can be a really good one and I know for myself, it's got me through some of the hard years or moments in my life. Like it was a supportive practice to look back on. Very distressing at the time, I hated it, but it did get me through teenage girl body image issues, it got me through my first heartbreak it got me through my first job, having to high of expectations of myself and just pushing myself to hard, and yeah, it's got me through so many really challenging periods of my life.

Fiona: 04:52

I think one of the things that's really interesting when we think about that, what we get from food is if we reflect back to when we're babies, so if you think about your son even, Josephine, if you think about Monty, when we feed them, what are they getting? They are getting nutrients, but they're often being held, they're getting a sense of comfort and love, they're often, when we think about breast milk it's sweet, so they're eating, they're being fed something sweet and they're getting love and comfort and safety. And that is something that we learn at that age that we can have from being nurtured and being nurtured through nutrients, so I think sometimes when we sort of go ‘oh, that's such a bad habit’ It's like, no, it's one that you learned, one of the first things that you learned which is that's where love and comfort and safety comes, and for people who don't have a lot of other avenues to receive love, comfort, safety, food is where you get that and that's really valuable.

And that's not to say that it can't also have issues for you and be something that is distressing, as you say, it's not something ‘I hate it. I hate that process. I hate that I'm doing this because I can see that it's also causing issues’, but can we think about it as something that is actually a natural and normal place to go?

Josephine: 06:32

Yeah and that's so valuable in breaking the cycle. I talk about the dieting cycle a lot with my clients, which starts with, well, can start anywhere in the cycle, but often is the shame of eating, which makes you put a food rule or makes you deprive yourself in some way, but that deprivation fuels food cravings. So then we eat and then we come back to feeling shameful about it all again, put the food rules and the deprivation back in place and we start to loop around this shame deprivation, eat shame cycle.

So if we can take what you're saying today Fiona and acknowledge that actually it does have a huge benefit being able to eat to soothe your emotions when your emotions are too big to handle, then yeah, I hope there's slightly shame for listeners in using it as a tool.

Fiona: 07:32

And I think one of the ways to do that as well in reducing that shame is in the consciousness of the choice. So you're choosing to use food as your tool in that moment rather than doing it unconsciously. So if we think, quite often about binge eating in particular, we're not in our bodies in that moment. You know, we've gone, our heads have gone all the way off and we're in that emotional space of craving and what that does is it means that we're choosing something or we're doing something without having chosen it. It can often feel like it’s ‘I don't feel like I had a choice. I had to do it’. It's there's, there's so much of an instinct and a craving that comes along with that and that happens with emotional eating as well that there's this desire that sort of feels like it takes your choice away.

Josephine: 08:28

It’s when you finish the family size block of chocolate that you realise that it happened, you know, the awareness is yeah, it happens so quick. Yeah

Fiona: 08:37

So can you catch yourself in that moment and actually give yourself the choice to do that.

Josephine: 08:45

Mmm, Yeah,

Fiona: 08:48

So you were saying a little bit about how some of these experiences with yourself were things that you didn't like, but things that you could acknowledge were helping you. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you balanced those two things? Because I think that's what happens to a lot of us, we might be having this habit of eating, binge eating or emotional eating that we don't like, but it's also giving us something, so it's hard to think about how we shift that or move into something else. How did you balance those two polarities?

Josephine: 09:19

Great question. At the time, I think what was fueling my emotional eating, particularly towards the end of my experience, emotional eating, which would have been, like late 20s, yeah, late 20s, really late 20s, there was the self-worth piece of setting my expectations really high, and the problem with self-worth is that each time you break a promise to yourself, your self-worth drops further, so I’d do things like, ‘right, I'm going to go to yoga three times this week’ and then fail to do it and feel like I remember writing in my journal ‘why can't I just commit to basic nurturing myself with movement?’ Like, why can't I do that? And it's because I was also expecting myself to work like 80, 90, you know, massive weeks and do all these other things at the same time, so each time I was setting these high expectations in every area of my life, the self-worth was getting worse and worse.

So, and then the other big part of the problem was that at that time I was in a long distance relationship and I was living in a flat where I felt really alone, and I was in a job where I felt out of my depth so there was lot of overwhelming feelings of loneliness and failure and they were just too big to handle a lot of the time, so I had this sense that actually when I am binge eating, that this is helping me deal with these big emotions. I knew that I had to find another way to deal with the emotions, I just hadn't found the way to do that yet.

Like there was moments of being with my body in yoga which we really helped or there was moments of deep social connection with girlfriends that really helped, but there wasn't anything I could consistently draw on or any practical, I was meditating I was doing all the things that I thought I should be doing, but the problem is with a lot of those practices for me, I found was that I was still in my head, like none of them were just the right one for me to do unassisted to get out of my head and into my body.

So the way I dealt with it was those moments of getting out of into my body with yoga and meditation and social connection, so that helped, that helped, but the problems still remained until I got into doing emotional release work and actually dealt with the problem of self-worth that was underneath. Why I had so many of these big emotions and feelings of failure, and it was a way to start feeling through those emotions and, yeah, understanding what self-worth was to me and how it could be accessible for me.

Fiona: 12:04

I love that you were able to make that connection as well that there was something deeper going on because I think sometimes we struggle even to do that part, is to identify that what's happening, the reason why it's happening is actually because of these other feelings.

Josephine: 12:21

Yeah, well, yeah, that's a really good point because I was a dietitian at this time, right? So if anyone can eat well, it's a dietitian. I’d graduated, it was my first dietetic job, so I knew that if I had food rules and I deprived myself that I would binge eat, so I had been really careful to make sure I had a good relationship with food, but the binge eating persisted, and at that point in time, I realized it was an emotional, an emotional-spiritual problem, that wasn't a physical problem, it food in-food-out, it wasn't that sort of problem that I was dealing with.

And I had to go through that moment of being like, ‘I'm the worst dietitian ever. If I can't not binge eat, then how are my clients ever going to not be able to do that?’ but I think that was just another part of the journey, yes food is part of this journey of binge eating and emotional eating, but it's only a piece of the puzzle and yeah, getting to the emotional root and being able to sit with your emotions and feel safe with them in your body is a big part of the puzzle as well.

Fiona: 13:29

I like to talk about it like digesting your life experiences. So, if you think about – with your dietician hat, what happens when we eat food is we chew it all up in our mouths, we mush it all down, we kind of pound it all out, it ends up in our stomach where our stomach is going ’okay, so what are the pieces here? What's actually here? What do I need to keep? What's valuable? What's nutritious for the body? Okay, I’m going to absorb those things and take those out of the food. What are the things that are actually not as nutritious right now? What don't, what don't I need? What do I have too much of or too little of? What are some of those things that I can get rid of?’

And then our body goes ahead and through our digestive process gets rid of the stuff that we don't need, and quite often what happens with our life experiences is we don't digest them fully, so we take on those things that are happening to us and we tend to hold on to both the nutritious, the lessons, the good things and also keep all the stuff that maybe we don't need out of that experience. We don't actually let that go, and for some of us that can actually reflect in our digestion when we are backed up.

And so if we sort of think about those big things, what's going on, have a think about it from that space of, ‘okay, I'm in this digestive process around this experience, this life experience, what are the things that I can take from it and how do I release and get rid of the things that I actually don't need from this experience anymore that I don't need to hold on to’, and that's really I think where that emotional release can come in and be so powerful.

Josephine: 15:16

Yeah, it definitely was for me.

I think we should take a moment to talk about food rules since we touched on it. So by food rules we mean… Well, How would you describe food rules Fiona?

Fiona: 15:28

Food rules is a big one because it can mean lots of different things to different people, so something as simple as ‘I will never have those two particular foods touch on a plate’ can be a food rule. It might be ‘I will never eat this type of food for breakfast because it's not a breakfast food’. It might be ‘I must eat at these certain times of the day’. It might be ‘I must eat a particular amount of calories’, so calories or kilojoules, whatever your energy measurement is. A lot of people use that to really dictate and make rules around what's happening with food. It might be ‘I'm not allowed to eat that piece of cake until I've done vigorous amounts of exercise or until I know that I've burnt off, I need to earn my food’. That's a really big food rule, so it can be really simple, small things around your habits and the decisions that you make. And it might be really sort of more bigger things around when you're allowed to eat or why you're allowed to eat, and what that permission piece looks like.

Josephine: 16:45

Yeah the no carbs after 7pm or you know, those little things that we have stored in our head that we might not even be realising that it's a rule for us, but they are there and they are dictating what we eat and they could be decreasing the satisfaction you have in the eating experience, which is when the food caving start to come in.

Fiona: 17:06

Yeah, absolutely.

Josephine: 17:09

And you were telling me a little bit about what different types of food cravings need emotionally, Fiona, I’d love you to share that it’s fascinating.

Fiona: 17:18

It's one of the things that I learned just after I did my original eating psychology training, which really looks at who you are as an eater, it doesn't look at what you're actually eating, it does a little bit, but the premise is really around, you know, we crave certain types of foods for a reason, and when we talk about a craving it’s not just ‘oh, I fancy a bit of that’, it's that really deep craving that's sort of visceral and that you really feel deeply and that can often tell you things about what's going on with your emotions, so usually if you're craving crunchy food or that needing that crunch, that can be rooted in anger. Often if you have a really big craving for dairy, that can be around your self-worth and needing comfort for yourself. Craving something like cola or fizzy drinks is often around, you're not really feeling energized, so you're really looking for energy and vitality in areas of your life.

When I have clients who talk to me about food cravings what we do is actually really look at ‘what is it that you're actually craving?’ because it might come to you in the form of ‘I'm craving this food’, but there's often something deeper in the emotional world that you're actually really craving or you need to release.

Josephine: 18:43

Honouring the intelligence of our bodies, they're so clever. An example I often use with clients is a lot of us will have cravings before we menstruate for sugar, for high fat foods and something I now learned recently is that if you have a heavy menstrual flow and you have a high saturated fat meal pre the night or 24 hours before your bleed, that your blood is better at clotting and it decreases menstrual flow. So actually having some fish and chips the night before your period might be exactly what you're craving, and actually could be beneficial. And we are so hard on ourselves for those cravings, but they're there for a reason and yeah, it could be that we need more energy, it could be that actually our body wants to have more clot ability for a menstrual flow. It could be so many different things.

Fiona: 19:44

Yeah, dark chocolate is another one at the menstruation, you get chocolate cravings.

Josephine: 19:52

Yeah, there’s your saturated fat.

Fiona: 19:53

It’s magnesium as well.

Josephine: 19:55

And magnesium.

Fiona: 19:56

Yeah, so the magnesium is often what it's there for.

Josephine: 20:01

It's just we’ve outsourced the power of health practitioners or like the media to tell us what's right to eat, but actually the power is within us and yeah, magnesium, saturated fat, who knows what your body's craving and who knows what reason it is for, but why maybe we should start to trust it a bit more.

Fiona: 20:24

Yeah, look deeper.

Josephine: 20:27

Mmm, yeah, absolutely. And I still find sugar so grounding if I'm stuck up in my head or feeling anxious, you know, a cup of tea and something sweet feels nourishing, nurturing and resourceful. Now that there's no food rule around that, it's something that I can choose to eat to ground myself into a moment and have that moment of pleasure and relaxation and I think I'll always use sugar like that for me it's so grounding, and I know in Dosha-types Eastern medicine, sugar is really useful for the Vata-type person, which I'm 40% Vata, so yeah, it can be used to ground.

Fiona: 21:10

I like to use salt, so for me grounding is salt, miso soup is a really good one that I’ll often use to help ground me or something with some spices. If you think about, you were just talking about that Eastern medicine, I'm a majority Kapha, so I need some of those spices and those saltiness to get things moving and to ground me, so even just between us to show that there are different things that different people need. It's really about looking inwards and that understanding and trusting what you're craving and following that more than necessarily what everybody else is doing.

Josephine: 21:50

Giving yourself permission to just experiment, be curious and honour and accept what's there within your body, it might not be like that forever, but it's there now.

Fiona: 21:57

I think there's such power in looking at your food rules and really giving yourself permission to eat something. I remember the first time I sort of said to myself ‘well, you are allowed to have chocolate whenever you like, whenever you like’. Or was it cake? Might have been cake, it could have been both, I was trying to do full ‘you now have permission to eat anything, anytime you want and it's unconditional, and you have the permission to do that’ and I still completely binged, because I was like, ‘Oh, great. I can eat everything now’ so I went and ate everything and I think that's often the fear of people when they go, if I don't have these rules in place, I'm going to swing so wildly to the other side and eat everything that I'm not going to be able to stop, but what happens is that after you've done that and you've eaten all the things and you know you can keep eating them, when you truly know you're allowed to eat them whenever you want, that feeling does subside and I clearly remember the first time I was sat at a cafe eating a piece of cake and it was just delicious, it was a really good cake, and I think I had about half of it and I thought ‘I don't want any more. I'm really satisfied with what I've eaten’ and that moment of power that gave me and a sense of, I don't need the rest of this you know, that just felt amazing to me because it had never happened before and because I knew that if I wanted some more cake later, I could eat some more cake later.

And so sometimes when we give ourselves the permission to change our food rules, if you have that fear that you're going to go too far the other way, I would say firstly, think about are you actually giving yourself full permission, truly and unconditionally? And trusting that you will know when you've had enough, maybe you go to that extreme because you need to eat all of that because you've been in deprivation for so long your body needs its fill. It's about trusting that if you swing to that pendulum, you will in fact swing back again and you'll find that even moment.

Josephine: 24:36

You don't need to do all food rules at once. You know. Start with bread, that's another terrifying one for a lot of people, then move into cake and just test the waters and see whether you actually do want that freedom in your life to be able to trust your body, trust your cravings, and actually choose, have some more freedom to choose what you eat.

Fiona: 24:59

And I think if you're going to choose to use food to ground, we're going to teach you a process to actually really pay attention and use that food for grounding, and I often say to clients after we do a mindful food or a mindful eating experience, is to just pick one meal or one snack or one thing that you eat a week and practice just using that as a grounding tool, because as you say it doesn't have to be every rule, it doesn't have to be every meal that you're mindful, that’s unrealistic to sort of go from one extreme to the other, so start small, pick one thing and build up.

Josephine: 25:48

Yeah, and I think one message we really want you to take away today is that grounding with food or numbing your emotions with food can be really helpful. There's always a choice that you can choose to eat or you can choose to do something else so you giving yourself permission to choose to binge sometimes is really freeing, is really supportive and it is a slow process of maybe binging a little less often over time, understanding your emotions and feeling them a bit deeper over time and then it becomes more of a grounding practice than a binging episode.

Fiona: 26:26

Yeah, you know creating a ritual around your binge if you're going to choose to do it. If you binge and one of the things you binge is the whole tub of ice cream, you're going to give yourself permission to eat that whole tub of ice cream, but what we're going to do is I'm going to ask you to go and find or buy if you've probably got a favourite bowl, everybody has a favourite bowl or a favourite mug. We all know we all have those things. Maybe, I say that, maybe we don’t. I do. I like my favourite spoon, like the small spoon, not the big spoon.

Find your favourite bowl. Serve yourself one or two scoops of ice cream. Eat them slowly. Go back. Serve yourself some more. So eat the whole tub of ice cream, that's okay, but make it a really nice ritual, and what you might actually find is that you don't need to eat the whole tub as you're doing it in that mind mindful way. If you do, that's okay because you've given yourself permission to do that as part of that binge, but often what happens is over time, we find we need less and less to get through that so it is about choosing, choosing to binge or choosing to use food and then creating that ritual and doing it mindfully.

Josephine: 27:43

Yeah, I love it. Becoming more and more mindful over time.

Fiona: 27:46

Absolutely.

Josephine: 27:48

Well, Fiona, do you want to take us through a grounding practice?

Fiona: 27:51

I would love to. So, this is the time where you will need your piece of chocolate or whatever it is that you chose to eat for this exercise. What I'm going to get you to do is to sit yourself comfortably, either on the ground or on the couch, you can have your little piece of chocolate in front of you.

And we're going to start by just taking a couple of deep slow breaths. So we'll take a nice inhale, and then a nice deep exhale, you can use some noise if you need to to get that breath out.

And another nice big inhale and exhale it out. And one more big inhale and a nice exhale out.

First I'm going to get you to take your piece of chocolate and hold it between your pointer finger and your thumb. I want you to bring your attention to it as if it was something, a novel item. Imagine you've never seen chocolate before in your life, so take the time to observe the chocolate carefully, really see it.

Gaze at it with care and full attention. Let your eyes explore every part of it noticing its shape, colours, surfaces. Examine its grooves, where the light shines and where the shadows are. Rotate and move the chocolate between your fingers, continuing to explore its texture. You can apply a small bit of pressure to notice whether it's soft or hard. You might even close your eyes if that helps you to focus and enhance your sense of touch.

So recognising that this is chocolate, take note of any thoughts you might have about chocolate, any memories about it, or feelings of liking or disliking it that comes up.

And then I want you to hold the chocolate under your nose and inhale naturally, so just keep breathing naturally through your nose. With each in breath, notice any aroma or smell that arises, and bring your awareness also to any effect that has in your mouth or in your stomach.

Now bring the chocolate slowly up to your mouth, noticing how your hand and arm know exactly how and where to position it. Being aware if your salivating, as the mind and body anticipate eating. Place the chocolate gently into your mouth, without yet chewing. Hold the chocolate in your mouth for at least 10 seconds, exploring it with your tongue, feeling the sensations of having it there.

Notice this pause and how it feels to take some time before eating the chocolate. When you're ready, prepare to chew the chocolate. Take one or two bites into it and notice what happens. Bringing in your full attention to its taste and texture. As you continue to chew, take time to do that without swallowing, noticing the taste and texture of the chocolate in your mouth and how it may change over time, often melting as it goes.

When you feel ready to swallow the chocolate, bring awareness to this sensation so that even this is experienced consciously. Lastly, notice what is left of the chocolate as you swallow and it travels down your stomach. Notice how your body as a whole is feeling at this moment. You might explore what's left in your tongue, any melted chocolate that's still there. Notice the feeling if you need to swallow again to move the last of that melted chocolate down towards your stomach.

And take a few moments to reflect on how this experience is the same or different from how you'd normally eat chocolate. If you had your eyes closed, you can now open them, gently come back into the room and take another deep breath to finish.

Josephine: 33:39

Oh, I love that. I haven't eaten a piece of chocolate that slowly in about 10 years when I tried this exercise the first time and did it quite regularly and, oh it’s just such a beautiful reminder of smell and texture and deep satisfaction and so satiating, I don't need another piece and I would never usually eat one piece of chocolate as a normal part of my eating, it just wouldn't happen, but interestingly, the bitter taste has just primed me for lunch, I'm ready to have something savory now please. That's enough for that.

Fiona: 34:20

As long as you eat that mindfully, then you're all good to go.

Josephine: 34:25

Yeah, yeah.

Fiona: 34:26

On that note, I think we might leave you for the week. Have a go at eating something mindfully. Have go at paying attention to your food rules and your cravings and let us know how you go. If you have questions about emotional eating, binge eating, body image, anything food related, please let us know on our Instagram. We would love to answer any questions that you have. And until next week, happy grounding with food.

Josephine: 35:05

Before we finish up for today, we would like to acknowledge the original custodians of the lands on which our podcast is created, the Ngāi Tahu people of Aotearoa New Zealand,

Fiona: 35:14

and the Cammeraygal people of the Eora Nation Australia. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging and to all our listeners who identify as Aboriginal, Torres Straight Islander, or Maori.

Josephine: 35:27

We love connecting with you, our listeners and talking about the topics that mean the most to you. Reach out to us on Instagram at Outside the Square Podcast and let us know what you want to hear more of.

Fiona: 35:37

Until next week, keep stepping outside your square.

Fiona: 35:45

How did it taste for you Josephine?

Josephine: 34:47

My chocolate was bitter, so yeah, I could really taste the bitterness of the dark chocolate and also the textures were so much more heightened like there was creaminess and then there was like a dryness to the dark chocolate too, so just going from the dry to when you're chewing to the creaminess sort of evolving in your mouth as it melts. It's just such a pleasurable, beautiful experience.