Understanding Your Eating

Portrait,Of,Sad,Bearded,Man,Watching,Tv,And,Holding,Bowl

Depressed,Woman,Eats,Cake.,Sad,Unhappy,Woman,Eating,Cake.,Sad

Emotional,Eating,,Mental,Disorder,,Depression,,Loneliness,,Stress.,Lonely,Woman,Eating

Depressed,Overweight,Man,Eating,Sweets,In,Living,Room,At,Night

Below is the “rain” that brought people to work with me. For the “sunshine”, please click here to read feedback from people, perhaps people like you, after they worked through “Understanding Your Eating” with me. If any of what they say resonates, please make contact and we can go from there, thank you.

What the people speaking below had in common, and the habit you may have developed, was eating to feel better when something upset them, got them down, angry or created some other emotional disturbance rather than turning to other people or coping strategies that lift mood without all the angst:

I would like to stop food being on my mind all the time.
I have long standing issues around food. Don’t want to feel like I am constantly battling myself.
Once I have this stuff, I can’t seem to eat just 1 of anything, I’ll devour a tube of [crisps] in 20 mins.
It’s fine during the day at work and then I get home and I start eating and I just can’t stop.
Despite previous attempts I am still stuck in a vicious cycle of guilt and self-loathing.
Yo-yo dieting my entire adult life. Life/self-esteem reached a low point since having my 2nd child.
My mother goes on and on about other people’s weight and has been criticising mine for years.
When friends and start taking pictures to post on social media, I don’t like having my picture taken. I don’t want to be the overweight one in the picture. I feel I look awful, I don’t want people to see.
I just don’t believe my partner when they say they love me the way I am when I feel so unattractive.
I have a dysfunctional relationship with food and I’ve been living with it for years and years.
I’m a fairly self-aware, organised individual, I should be able to sort this out, why can’t I sort it out?
I’ve had a restrictive and binge eating unhealthy relationship with food since my teens and I don’t want to pass on my way of being with food to my children.
I’ve reached a point where it is intolerable, I’m at my lowest point and know it is time to seek help.
I can be good for days and then I slip a bit and then that’s it, I’m eating all the bad stuff.
Secret eating, binge eating – I feel embarrassed by this and I don’t want to tell people.
My weight has been climbing for 8 months and now I am the heaviest I’ve ever been.

Who hasn’t turned to crisps, chocolate, fridge or freezer for comfort and soothing in times of distress? We have the term comfort eating after all for goodness sake! The trouble starts when it’s the “go to strategy” several times a day. Weight piles on, often frighteningly fast, your focus shifts to losing weight and when a binge undermines your efforts the “why can’t I do this, I am such a failure / disgusting / useless / whatever-you-say-to-yourself” self talk starts and, in a vicious irony, when upset, you eat which makes things worse by kicking the whole horrible cycle off again (aka emotional eating, binge eating or eating to manage feelings).

You may not even realise you are eating your emotions so good have you become at suppressing them. If you’re baffled by sporadic bouts of uncontrollable overeating which feels compulsive, addictive even, then Understanding Your Eating (UYE) could be for you.

Please click here to see what people who’ve worked through UYE with me have to say, thank you.

UYE is a series of hour long modules developed from research carried out by Julia Buckroyd, Emeritus Professor of Counselling of the University of Hertfordshire and Honorary Fellow of the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists. Early on in a career of 40 years Professor Buckroyd had a full time job as Student Counsellor at the London Contemporary Dance School so you can see why she developed a huge curiosity about how we use food which never left her.

UYE helps you to explore whether you are eating to deal with your feelings and teaches you how you can start to use other ways of managing your emotions and your life.

I am not telling you what to eat or how much as I am sure you know plenty about that already, instead the aim is to help you think about how you use food, so that you can be better placed to choose whether you want to continue doing it that way.

You will learn better ways of managing your feelings and be less tempted to use food to comfort yourself. You will become more confident with better self esteem and a better body image. You will find that food becomes much less of an anxiety and no longer dominates your thinking.

UYE consists of:

An Introduction which gives the basics during 5 one hour modules run over 5 consecutive weeks. There is a short workbook for each module completed in the session and a little bit of homework to do between each module to apply insights gained or new things learned:

The five modules of the Introduction have the following titles:

Module 1: Emotional Eating (eating is not just about hunger).

Module 2: Self-soothing (eating to manage feelings, where it comes from).

Module 3: Self esteem (and how it helps you look after yourself better).

Module 4: Body Esteem (how the “lookist” culture in which we live leads to over-valuing of appearance).

Modules 5: Relationships (involving people instead of food to get you through the day).

After the Introduction there is the option to choose from nine further modules which work in more detail on things which may be particularly troublesome for you so finding the motivation and empowerment for change, self esteem, body esteem, meal planning so you don’t get ravenously hungry or have to eat badly because there is no other option and so on.

Next Steps:

If you’ve not already spoken to your GP about your eating then I’d counsel (no pun intended !) you to do so please. A voracious appetite can be a symptom of anything from pregnancy to diabetes to an overactive thyroid. In my view you must rule out any physiological causes for eating which you feel has become excessive compared to what you consider normal.

Having established that there is no such cause, and so as to avoid paying for the Intro only to come along and discover your eating is not emotion driven, I suggest we set up a 50 minute (non-chargeable) “Chemistry Test” session so you can tell me about what is bothering you about your eating.

You and I can establish if UYE is likely to help and then, as said earlier, we can go from there, thank you.

Please email clairedysoncounselling@gmail.com or give me a ring on 07950 986 085, thank you.

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