I remember many a night after spending a lovely evening with friends that as I was driving home I began to fantasize what I was going to eat when I got home. Unbelievable! Even after a five-course meal I was hungry, I still long for how food was going to make me feel when I got home. The healing process begins when we welcome the hunger and learn that it is the knock to let us know that something is emotionally out of balance. When the knock arrives and our bodies goes into automatic ‘hunger’ mode then we must go inside and begin a process to identify what out is of balance, where is our discomfort? What it is that we must face in order to unmask the emotional hunger?

Sometimes I have to go through a process:

q What is it that I am hungry for?
q Am I so anxious that I will probably eat directly from the refrigerator or from the kitchen counter?
q How do I believe I'm going to feel after I’ve had the food?
q What is it that will change after I'm eaten that luscious, delicious food?

In order to even ask these questions we need to quiet the mind and have the courage to go beyond the persona that causes the emotional hunger. Some of the discomfort arises because we have not learn to honor our humanity. We must shatter whatever persona we created that violates our ability to feel our emotions. We are not always going to be cool, or suave, or witty, or clever, or devoir, or sweet, or in control, or accommodating, or understanding, or available, or whatever the delusion we have presented to the world, or what is worse, to ourselves. We are flesh and blood. Our humanity entails that we experience a range of emotions. Healing the emotional hunger begins when we accept, embrace and welcome all of our emotions, the ugly ones, the socially unacceptable ones, the occasion inappropriate one, all of them. We cannot continue to ignoring some of our emotions and continuing to eat through them.

Our very modern lives generate a level of anxiety that sometimes disrupts our ability to be with our feelings. We might have to first breathe deeply, or meditate, or just slow down, or just ask questions similar to what a concerned friend would ask, or journal, or pray, or ask for guidance so we can get pass and hear our needs, or our pain, disappointment, etc.

Once we learn how to get in touch with our emotions, we need to learn how to be with the emotion, how to accept them as part of the human condition. Our loneliness, our disappointment, our boredom, the blues, our anger, anxiety, whatever the emotion is. How can I be with you? How can I feel you intensely? I prefer to write and have a conversation with my loneliness or boredom and get to the bottom of its cause. Then it is easier for me to be with myself, instead of distracting myself with food.

We must make only one commitment. When the emotional hunger strikes whatever our method of getting in touch with the truth we must invoke this method. In "The End of Diets: Healing Emotional Hunger" we explore several methods to getting to the truth. For example, breathing, meditation and journaling and how these tools are used by an emotional eater to get to the bottom of the emotional hunger. When the emotional hunger strike -- and I finally know the difference between emotional and physical hunger – I know it is time for me to go within. Journaling has to be open ended and brutally honest and we must allow it to take us into whatever area we need to express ourselves and get beyond the emotional hunger and into the emotion that is hiding behind the hunger. Only when I allow this level of honestly do I experience an energetic shift. I then begin to experience the emotion behind the hunger and paradoxically the hunger stops.

Change your options, click here to begin the healing process today!