Winter Wellness Guest Blog: Laura Folkes, Holistic Health Coach!
As part of Winter Wellness, we’re featuring guest blogs from local health and wellness businesses to help you kick off the new year with intention! Check out this guest blog from Laura Folkes, Certified Holistic Health Coach on why you eat when you’re not hungry. You can find a special offering from her and other local businesses on our Winter Wellness page at www.lakeviewroscoevillage.org/winterwellness.
Why You Eat When You’re Not Hungry
How many times do you eat when you aren’t hungry? Do you ever feel hungry but logically know it isn’t possible (aka phantom hunger)? Or, you’re in automatic pilot and don’t check in to see if you’re hungry or not.
Picture this: You wrap up a long day, finish dinner, clean up, do a few things around the house and then finally sit down to unwind. As soon as your butt hits the couch, the thought pops in your head, ‘Before you get comfortable go grab a snack or two.’ So you get up, walk into the kitchen and start grazing. First Ben and Jerry’s calls your name. Then the bag of chips, followed by the cookies. You just finished dinner so deep down you realize you aren’t hungry but for some reason you can’t stop yourself from eating it all.
When you reunite with the couch, the guilt and shame set in. If only you had more willpower or discipline, right?
There have likely been evenings you didn’t think about the food and then other times you just couldn’t resist it. The food didn’t change, so what did?
The Cycle That Takes You Off Track
How we eat is a symptom when we’re feeling emotionally or physiologically at risk in some way. In order to end self-sabotage and experience sustainable change with your relationship with food, we need to understand why you eat out of alignment with your goals.
Often when we’re lacking willpower or discipline around food, it can lead to feeling out of control with our food choices. It’s frustrating because you have good intentions and want to be healthy, but something stops you from being consistent with working towards your health, weight and/or wellness goals.
When we binge eat, emotionally eat or stress eat, we’re typically going through this unconscious cycle that doesn’t have to do with self-discipline or willpower
Source: Ali Shapiro, Truce with Food®
We’ll focus on the trigger, since that’s what typically trips off this cycle. There are four common triggers that lead people to eat, which are feeling:
Tired: We might feel physically or emotionally tired and need food to re-energize or fill up our proverbial tanks.
Anxious: Often when we’re feeling anxiety, there is a level of uncertainty too. We’re not taught how to deal with uncertainty, so it feels unsafe and shows up as anxiety in our bodies.
Inadequate: Some ways this shows up is by feeling like we aren’t good enough in certain situations. It isn’t necessarily consistent across the board that we feel inadequate in general. It’s more there are places or situations we feel like we have failed, are inadequate or aren’t good enough.
Lonely: Even when we have a great support system and people around us, there are times we might feel lonely, alone or isolated. It can also come up when we don’t feel heard or seen by others.
(You can use the acronym TAIL to remember the triggers.)
When we eat, it isn’t the trigger itself that starts this cycle. We perceive the feeling is “bad”, so we gear up in an effort to not choose the wrong thing. We also don’t always know what’s happening beneath the surface, so it feels uncomfortable, and we turn to food to avoid the discomfort.
What Are Your Triggers?
To help reduce some of the guilt and shame after you eat out of alignment with your goals, take a moment and see if you can identify any times during the day you were feeling one of the TAIL emotions. Really pay attention and tune into what you were feeling when you went off track with your food or felt “tempted” by food. You want to think about what emotion was triggered in you, not what others were feeling or the actual events. It’s an inward focus!
What we want to see is there usually isn’t one big event that leads us to eat. It’s typically a buildup of multiple events we may not realize even triggered us.
Shifting Your Relationship With Food
Clarity and awareness are powerful in creating a more balanced relationship with food so you can move to a more neutral space instead of staying in the love/hate pattern. The goal is to get to a place where you no longer have to resist food or feel controlled by it.
Are you curious to explore how this pattern shows up for you so you can transform your relationship with food? If so, let’s chat during a 40-minute Curiosity Call! The call is free from shame, guilt and judgment. You’ll fill me in on your challenges with your relationship with food, gain insight, and will have a safe space to talk about what’s been swirling around in your mind. You’ll walk away knowing the steps to create sustainable change (no willpower required)! There’s absolutely no charge for our first chat.
About Laura:
Laura B. Folkes is a Certified Holistic Health Coach and holds a certification from the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN). She has supported over 80 clients who know what they should be eating but have a hard time sticking to it by helping them identify the familiar patterns keeping them stuck so they can radically transform their relationship with food.
Laura is a facilitator of the research-based Truce with Food® process, which helps clients achieve sustainable results by getting to the bottom of why they fall off track and aren’t able to remain consistent. She’s also the creator of the self-paced course, “Behind Your Cravings.”
After successfully losing 60 pounds and working through her own emotional relationship with food, Laura’s mission became helping others get to the bottom of their self-sabotaging patterns.
Laura coaches clients one-on-one, in small groups, runs workshops, speaks at summits and conferences, and has been featured in Voyage Chicago. Laura can be contacted at www.laurabfolkes.com or laura@laurabfolkes.com