Do you Struggle with Emotional Eating During the Holidays?

ByDonna Weber

Emotional eating is a problem for many people, especially during the holiday season. Studies show that weight gain is modest, only 1 ½ pounds on average, but this adds up over time.

Have you ever wondered why the holiday season causes so many of us to feel sad and causes us to overeat? There are so many tasty treats around, we eat, hoping that we will feel better.

We are going to look deeper into holiday overeating.

Why you feel sad during the holidays

If you have been reading my blog, you will know that I focus on unresolved emotions from the past and what to do about them.

The holidays seems to trigger emotions from the past more than most times. Even though you want to enjoy the season, you find yourself remembering unhappy events from the past. Sometimes you don’t remember the event, you only feel the emotions – lonely, sad, angry, etc.

We feel bad around the holiday season because we have such high expectations and often these expectations are not met. We want Christmas and Thanksgiving to be special and perfect.

For many of us this disappointment started when we were children. We wanted our family to get along for one day. We wanted enough money so that everyone could have a present. We wanted to feel loved and special.

When this did not happen, your heart broke. You may still be feeling that wounded heart from childhood. It never healed.

Why you overeat

Overeating around the holiday season is easy for anyone. There is so much good food and family and friends show love by feeding us. Growing up in my family food was love.

When you have unresolved emotional wounds, it feels like you have a hole in your heart or your belly. The holiday season causes you to be more aware of this wound than ever.

You eat to fill these emotional holes. Unfortunately no matter how much you eat, you can never fill an emotional hole. You can’t fill it with food or shopping or overwork.

What can fill you up?

You need to fill your wounds with love, nurturing, safety, respect, understanding, etc. Whatever you needed when the original wound was created is exactly what you need now.

Ask yourself: what do you need to feel whole and complete again? You may find that you have known the answer all along. The only question is: how can you fill your emotional wound with the quality you need?

One way to fill your wound is to learn the poetry of emotion process. With three easy steps you can recover exactly what you need to fill yourself up. You can heal wounds from the past.

When you are full of love, high self-esteem, and you believe deserve the best from life, you don’t need food to make you feel better.

This holiday season, try filling up on love, not food.

(Image: Betty Crocker Recipes @ Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/34651567@N05/4163621725/)

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