Emotional Eating, Self-Soothing with Food: A Discussion

This is a conversation between me (Erin) and a handful of clients in an open coaching call. We worked through some ideas about why we soothe our feelings of sadness, loneliness, unworthiness, confusion, chaos, grief etc with food... and if it ACTUALLY works to soothe us; or if it makes us feel worse; or some combination of things.

HEADS UP: We do not come to a solution in this chat. We simply talk openly and let our thoughts flow. We have some neat breakthroughs I think.

And this is not some "expert leader" guiding the crew through an explanation and a plan for emotional eating. Quite the opposite. I am not an expert on this because... I don't do it.

So we explored that too. Why do some people do it and others don't?

I'm in the business of having meaningful discussion so we can understand ourselves. I am not always seeking The Answer according to the experts or the literature. Instead let's spend some uncomfortable time learning to know thyself.

Let's burrow into the LIVED EXPERIENCE of soothing our emotions with food and, with curiosity and non-judgment, see what we can learn about ourselves.

It was a great conversation with many good ideas and fascinating points of view, and I'd love for you to take a listen and add anything to it that you think might be pertinent.

Note: This is a super rough-cut edit. It is literally a 30-minute chunk yanked out of a 60-minute coaching call done via Zoom. It's "rustic." :)