Q&A 25 – Overeating: What are we escaping from?

So often we believe we have unwanted habits like overeating because of the circumstances of our lives. We innocently believe that we’re trying to escape from old feelings (maybe even trauma) by doing our unwanted habit. What if that’s not the case? What if the only problem lives between our ears? What if, when we understand that our experience of life comes from the inside-out, our unwanted habits dissolve?You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.Resources from this Episode* Online course: Freedom From Overeating * Book: It’s Not About the Food * Unbroken podcast episode 11 with Jonelle SimmsTranscript of this episodeHello explorers and welcome to Q&A episode number 25 of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. Today, I want to talk about what we’re comforting ourselves from, or escaping from when we have an unwanted habit like overeating. I’ve talked about this before in different ways on this show, and I even had a podcast with my guest, Jonelle Simms, to talk about it. And then last night, I was out for a walk and saw it insightfully in a new way. So I wanted to share here in case you hear something new and fresh and different, and as always, with the intent of helping you to resolve an unwanted overeating habit and reduce your suffering. So here’s how it goes. Here’s what I saw. As you probably know, as I’ve talked about, lots, for 30 years, I really delved into the self-help world to try to resolve my overeating habit. And that was completely innocent. I did what felt best, what was available to me at the time, and maybe you’ve had a similar experience. The message that I got from that exploration was really a very outside in message, that we in life have experiences and circumstances that are difficult, and they create difficult emotions in us. It’s all coming from the outside in, and that we’re using our substance of choice -in my case, it was food – to comfort ourselves about those experiences. It’s about the residue that’s left within us from those experiences, supposedly. And so therefore, the next step in that healing journey was to, for me, and through via all the self-help stuff, was to try to learn how to comfort myself in a different way, and to excavate the trauma that may have been laid down at some point. Looking back in the past, and seeing what events or circumstances could have led to me having this what looked like a need at the time to comfort myself with food. And again, all very innocent, all motivated by wanting to suffer less and wanting to heal this problem. The challenge is, though, that as we explore the inside-out understanding that our experience doesn’t come from the outside in. And so what we’re really trying to manage, I now see, via things like diets, but other kinds of things as well, the self-help approaches to things… I always hesitate to mention what the self-help protocols could be, because they’re not bad in and of themselves, they’re just coming at the problem from the wrong angle. You know what kind of self-help stuff you’ve tried. And willpower, that’s another thing that we all try. And maybe behavioral changes like not keeping certain foods in the house or creating rules around what kinds of food we can eat or what time of day we can eat, or whatever it is.