Stop emotional eating, what your snacking is really telling you

Let me take you to the snack drawer.

You know the one.

You've just walked past it for the fourth time today.

This time you go in.

Not because you're hungry.

You're not even sure why.

You just needed something.

I had a message this week from a lady who's about to join The Intuitive Table.

She wasn't sure it would help with her snacking.

Fair question.

So I asked her, what does the snacking actually look like?

Turns out it's the fridge, then the snack drawer, then a bit more before tea, then a bit more after.

Mid-morning snack, 3pm snack, you know the ones.

She said, "I'm snacking on rubbish."

That word, rubbish, is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Because the second food becomes good or bad, naughty or rubbish, it stops being food.

It becomes a decision with morality attached.

And morality is exhausting to negotiate with fifteen times a day.

Here's what I actually asked her.

Are you hungry?

Not, are you eating badly.

Not, do you need more willpower.

Just, are you hungry.

Sounds obvious.

It isn't, not after years of dieting.

You lose the ability to tell.

You stop trusting your own body to tell you when it's had enough, or when it needs more.

So you end up back in the drawer, guessing.

Then there's the habits.

11am and it's tea and biscuit time, because it's always tea and biscuit time.

Not because you're hungry at 11am specifically.

Because that's just what happens at 11am.

Same with walking in the door and going straight to the fridge.

Nothing to do with hunger.

Everything to do with pattern.

And then, underneath all of it, there's the bit I always leave until last.

Because you need the other tools first.

Emotional eating.

Not the crying into a ice cream tub on the sofa kind.

The sneaky kind.

Someone hasn't replied to your text and you're a bit wound up about it, so you have a snack.

You've had a stressful call, so you need a trip to the fridge to disassociate.

You don't clock it as emotional.

It just looks like snacking.

But whenever food or drink is being used to numb something, distract from something, or avoid something, that's what it is.

And if that root never gets looked at, you'll be in that drawer again tomorrow, and the day after.

I had a client, a few months into coaching now, who used to track every single calorie.

For years.

She recently told me she'd "hadn't got a lot to report actually."

Then she just talked me through her week.

A walk with a friend.

Signing up for a course.

Nothing about food at all.

She said it felt like she was "just existing."

I loved that.

That's the whole point.

Not a transformation you can see.

Just your life, back, with all the room that used to be taken up by tracking and deciding and negotiating with a packet of biscuits, given back to you.

This is exactly what we work through, week by week, at The Intuitive Table.

Language around food, tuning back into hunger, the habits running the show, diet culture, food rules, and yes, emotional eating.

Eight weeks, one table.

We start Monday 14th September at 9.30, at Shropshire Health in Leaton, ten minutes from Shrewsbury with loads of free parking.

I talk through all of this properly in this week's Chatting with Cara episode, if you'd rather listen than read. You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or search "Chatting with Cara" wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you're the one always in the snack drawer, wondering why, come and take a seat.

Find out more here and take your seat.

Cara

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