Have you ever wondered why most diets and health plans fail? Human beings are a lot more complex than “Eat This Not That!” or “Move more, eat less!” or “No pain, no gain”. We are complex social creatures, capable of an incredible array or complex emotions and behaviors, most of them unconscious, automatic, and safe from our conceptual or cognitive reach.
We know this “human behavior is hard to change” thing firsthand – after all, our job is to support people in implementing the action steps and habits to get them from where they are to where they dream to be. If it were easy, the whole coaching industry would collapse! You know that firsthand too – after all, we have all, in our humanity, succeeded in changing some habits, and others not so much!
There’s an area of change where things are particularly tricky with food- and that’s on the intersection of neurobiology and emotional regulation. We are born prewired with receptors for the very neurotransmitters that signal connection, bonding, nurturance, safety. We are also born prewired with the expectation for bonding, safety and nurturance mediated by the nervous system and the nerves that wire the face, throat, and organs. Without getting into the complex wiring of the parasympathetic system, let’s just say that there is a system outside of your conscious control that responds to specific signals for safety – and if those signals are not in place – food behaviors can come in to substitute for those. In a way – food comes in to do what your nervous system, should it be wired and firing properly, and should you be in a safe environment, is normally able to do on its own.
If only, though, right? In my Peace with food retreats, classes and workshops, people share so many of the same struggles: gut issues, autoimmunity, fatigue, mental health challenges, and emotional regulation challenges. Their systems haven’t failed, they have just been coping the best way they can, and the best learned way is not always the best natural way.
Once you learn that there is a complex neurobiology that is the driver for these symptoms and how food has both provided temporary relief and has often caused long term suffering, you have taken the first step to peace with food.
If you too would like freedom from emotional eating or emotionally driven restriction, if you’d like to learn more about the role of the nervous system and how you can help yourself today, I invite you to take my online workshop on September 26. You still have time to enroll and experience the same freedom my clients have. It’s so powerful, you will wonder why you didn’t do it sooner!
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