Why it's a good idea to eat your feelings sometimes.

There's something I've been thinking about around the discourse about emotional eating. It's so annoying to me when people are like "I'm eating my feelings" (for 100000 reasons), but one reason is that I think that part of what gets mixed up in that is: there are feelings that are in your life that perhaps you are eating as a way to distract from them, self-soothe, etc. But there are also feelings in your life that are "not real" that are caused by having low blood sugar or otherwise mood instability that is caused by not having eaten. So like, PLEASE eat those feelings, cuz those are feelings whose purpose and only meaning is to instruct you to eat.

Coming off of a ginormous process of learning how to eat regularly as one key way of regulating my mood, I'm finding myself so aware of how connected mood is with blood sugar and with stable eating patterns, and wondering how often this is a core piece of emotional stuff that goes on for people. Not that it is the only cause or always the solution, but in our food-distorted society I would be surprised if this were not very often somehow linked.

For me, I want to be like, if a therapist had asked me at the very beginning of the time that I was having a hard time like a decade ago, 'Are you truly eating enough and often enough?' and actually helped me learn how to do that then, I could have just skipped a million other stages of being like "But what do these feelings meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeean???" Cuz, um, they mean, "you need to eat more food."

And I observe that one of the things the anti-emotional-eating discourse does, is steer people away from realizing that food can be something that is emotionally grounding and regulating (because if they feel better when they eat, the interpretation becomes "Well, probably I feel better now because I'm just using food to numb out" instead of being "Wow, I really needed to eat").

And the discourse influences therapists that way too, which is even worse. Like when I have asked therapists to support me around eating more regularly and explained that my tendency is to not realize that I'm not eating enough, and that when I eat way more and way more often than I could imagine needing, I feel SO much better, the response has sometimes been a concerned "Hm, you're saying that you feel emotionally better when you eat?" And I'm like YEAH, CUZ YOU KNOW, OUR BODIES NEED SOME FOOD IN THEM IN ORDER TO BE EMOTIONALLY REGULATED. But there can be this self-doubt that creeps in that pushes me in the direction again of thinking that I don't need to eat as often as I actually do, like "What if this is a kind of numbing and not actually a nutrient that is fixing my brain?" (After which I have to remind myself, "Remember when you used to cry uncontrollably every day in class? Do you want that to ever be your life again? No? Great, you should probably keep eating food.") But in general, blech!!!!