Heart to Mouth: How to Deal with Those Raw Emotions

Originally published in Get Fresh! magazine December 2007:

So you know what to eat, but you’re still not doing it (and maybe you’re not even completely sure why…) or perhaps you’re more than well aware that your emotions are ruling your diet more than your head but you just can’t seem to break the pattern? Ready to ease the pain and get healthy? Karen Knowler clears the path…

Like the majority of the clients I work with, Susan (name changed), 41, had no problem at all sharing with me from the get-go that emotional eating was at the core of her weight and energy issues.

“I just can’t seem to help myself,” she sighed. “It doesn’t matter if my head is busy telling me it’s no good for me or that it will make me gain even more weight, in that moment I really don’t care. I’ll just open the fridge and wolf down whatever looks good at the time… and then of course I just feel fat and sick afterwards. It’s been going on for way too long now. I hate the way I look and feel. I’ve really had enough!”

While for Susan her reason for compulsive overeating was mostly around the loneliness she felt after her mother (also her best friend) unexpectedly moved away, for another client, Sarah, 35, her regular weekend binges were mainly around boredom and a general lack of life direction along with some emotional hangover from a long-term heartbreak that hadn’t been fully healed. For Miranda, 25, it was mostly about self-sabotage; quite simply she didn’t want to stop bingeing because dropping the excess weight would equal “slim”, and slim would mean being sexually attractive. Having been sexually abused as a teenager, slim was not something she therefore aspired to be and food had come to provide the perfect layer of protection – both emotionally and physically; this, to her mind at least, was guaranteed to keep her “safe”, a price she was willing to pay even if she didn’t necessarily love what she saw in the mirror. For Natasha, 32, something completely different again. For her it was all about fear – fear of people, fear of being seen and fear around any new experiences; as we delved deeper we discovered that essentially this came down to a fear of feeling fully alive in her own skin as well as fully engaging with life. By overeating on a daily basis, usually at night after dinner, she could keep very easily keep herself credibly occupied, thus finding herself “mysteriously” devoid of the time or energy required to engage with the world or to face any of those fears that were increasing steadily by the day. Why deal with our stuff when eating is so much easier?

I would estimate that at least 98% of the people I have worked with eat for emotional reasons, and I feel confident that this figure would be just as applicable to any group of people interviewed randomly on any street, in any town, on any day of the week, during any week of the year. Whether it’s for boredom, tiredness, lethargy, depression, sadness, grief or any other negative emotion you care to name, food has become, it seems, the universally applied band-aid for just about every emotional malady conceivable.
But why should this be so?

Many believe, myself included, that this almost unstoppable drive to “eat our pain away” all stems back to babyhood when, as soon as we cried – be it from hunger, tiredness, fear, isolation or whatever upset us at the time – we would automatically have a breast or bottle thrust into our cupid’s bow and all would suddenly be well in the world. Sweet, warm, creamy… Mmmm! Immediately transported, rescued and loved all in one magical, hypnotically dreamy move! When the world seems like a big scary place, to switch your focus completely towards the pleasures coming in, and having your basic human need of feeling “nourished” met instead (and certainly a lot of that nourishment would have come from the sense of close human contact rather than the actual milk), it’s not hard to see why this connection between food and comfort has become so tightly bound into our subconscious since as long as we can remember.

Of course, this “loving” approach to making it all better continued for all of us well beyond those first few months and all the way into and beyond toddler hood. As per infancy, if we hurt ourselves, were sad, lonely, bored, disgruntled, unaccountably blue or had had a bad day at school, then a hand-held trip to the sweet shop, or a “special treat” from the cupboard, fridge or freezer – whatever our issue might be, with a few hungry bites of our food of choice it would all soon be history and our problem solved. Well, for at least five minutes anyway.

In the light of this obviously it’s no wonder that almost all, if not entirely all of us have continued employing this coping pattern well on into adulthood where it has remained an almost automatic response that kicks in during times of stress, pain or worry. This seems to remain no matter who we are, how “evolved” we consider ourselves to be, or any other variable we may throw in to the mix. If we’re human and breathing, we’re very likely doing this to some degree on a fairly regular basis, whether we consciously realise it or not.
For clients coming to me with this issue, essentially of not knowing how NOT to eat for comfort, or indeed what to do instead, because of the niche I work within (raw foods coaching) I am usually gifted with the wonderfully useful head start of them having toyed with raw foods, even if only for a while, and this is how their awareness usually began. For many, just like me, until they tried to “go raw” they had no clue just how often they were eating for emotion, and so when they tried to repeat old patterns and quash their pain with an apple, banana or salad rather than with their usual comfort food of choice, it simply didn’t happen. At this point, as it did for Susan, it becomes abundantly clear: To create a truly happy, nurturing adult relationship with food, we have to find alternative genuinely uplifting and healing ways of getting our emotional needs met – because food never has and never will heal our pain; it can only, ultimately, increase it, along with our waistline.
So where on earth do we begin?

STEP 1: Our first step is to recognise that our body, the “theatre stage” where all of this action and drama occurs houses all of us.

And by “all of us” I don’t just mean the tongue, stomach, bones, arteries and all of the other visibly physical aspects that make up our body, but absolutely just as importantly, our heart, our mind and, to varying degrees depending on your own beliefs and personal philosophy, our soul. Recognising that we are more than just what we see is the first step, because we know when we eat for emotional reasons we are driven mostly by something intangible and for many that is the problem. For some it never seems fully real.

STEP 2: Know and understand that every part of you has a voice and each part needs to verbalise differently in order to be healthy.

For example when you have a brilliant idea, do you jot it down in a flurry of grateful excitement or run screaming into the kitchen, fling open the fridge door and frantically throw together a jam and salami sandwich? How about when you feel inspired… as if in that amazingly lucid and connected moment you feel you have been blessed with every feeling of contentment, peace and harmony you have ever hoped or longed for and heaven is in your heart, do you breathe it all in and savour every second or jump in the car and make haste to secure a Big Mac and fries asap?

Depending on how emotionally driven you are, in both cases – mind and soul – you would (hopefully) naturally and joyfully be moved to do the former rather than the latter. This is because in order to be fully functional and vibrantly healthy the mind loves to create or “dump” externally while the soul, a more subtle but significantly more profound creature, yearns to be enjoyed and experienced as deeply as it possibly can be internally.

As for the heart, ah, an interesting one! The heart could very easily be referred to as “feelings central.” There is so much going on in here that it very much yearns to be experienced as much internally as externally, very probably in roughly equal measure – so much to give, and yet so much to gain! Truth be told it wants nothing more than to have its whole range of emotions to be fully felt and expressed in both directions without radical censorship in order for it to feel well and truly alive and beating.

Alas, of course, as we have already learned, this natural desire has been perpetually smothered, drowned or shunned upon ever since the day we were born. And if it hasn’t been with food then it’s more than likely been with words or even violence. It’s really no wonder that many of us grow up to be emotionally suppressed, stifled or feeling inadequate with no roadmap ever given to us for getting into authentic, joyful, fear-free emotional alignment.

And this is where the magic of raw foods comes in.

One of the major things that “raw” calls us to do is to step fully into our power, our energy and our truth – on every level. No mean feat at the best of times!

And when it comes to accessing Truth, most if not all of us will agree that when we intuitively know something to be true, we feel it deep within our heart usually before we know or feel it anywhere else.

When raw food meets the body, it is commonly reported that the whole experience of eating raw foods versus cooked intuitively feels “right” and “good” and “true”. By eating raw foods on a consistent and as-close-as-we-can-get-to-exclusive basis we automatically find that more truths start to emerge for us, inside and out – and here’s where it starts to get really interesting!

And to fully explore and understand how we can release our pain and heal our heart we’re going to have to talk “energetically” now rather than black-and-white physical, because it’s in the unseen, the place where many of us rarely go, that the answers lay…

Those of you who are familiar with the concept of chakras* will know that the heart chakra – our fourth (and middle) chakra of the seven each of us has within our body, is located in our chest and is said to be the centre of our truth; it’s the door to what really is – not what we think should be there, not what we hope for, but what is really real. Our truth: our real, live, honest-to-God, whatever-way-you-look-at-it-there's-really-no-denying-it, truth. It is commonly depicted pictorially and energetically as being green – the colour of peace, balance, harmony and nature.

The next chakra up, our fifth, just north of our heart lays our throat chakra. This is where, in an ideal scenario, we would consistently be speaking our truth and showing up as we really are. When we refuse or resist speaking our truth for whatever reason, we can often find throat-related illnesses or symptoms manifesting in the body’s bid to draw attention to the problem. Essentially it reminds us that if we don’t express our feelings verbally then the body will draw our attention to it again and again, often to very painful degrees until we finally do (or say) something.

Now, with both locations in your mind, imagine a tunnel or channel forming between the throat and the heart, with the movement heading south. What springs to mind? What activity do we experience in our physical body that starts at the throat and then goes down? The act of swallowing perhaps? The journey of food? Or drink? Or drugs? Or cigarette smoke? Yes, that amazing “portal” that is the throat is there for one purpose only: To accept positive nourishing energy from the outside world and to bring it in to the body, and also, on some level as everything is connected, to the heart. Doesn’t it seem such a shame that we instead choose to fill it with things that essentially overwhelm, undernourish or poison us?

So when we swallow foods, drinks or other less-than-great substances that really aren’t that good for us (and we know it!), what do you suppose might happen within our heart? Do you think it might retreat, energetically speaking? Might it feel muffled, drowned out, suffocated somehow? More than likely it will feel the need to protect itself and shut down. Yes, I really do believe it does. Such is the effect of comfort eating. Even though on some level we may feel as if we are giving ourselves a gift, deep down we know that this couldn’t be further from the truth. We are keeping our tears and pain inside when they very much belong out in the open.

So when we transition to eating increasing amounts of fresh, pure, raw and living foods, the channel between the throat and the heart most definitely starts to become increasingly clear, not just because a much purer and healthier environment is being created physically, but just as importantly because a mutually beneficial energetic relationship is being formed between the two. As we take in more authentic, “straight-talking” foods (raw = raw!), the pathways begin to clear all over the body, after all that is the nature of cleansing, but this cleansing occurs especially energetically around the heart, where the communication becomes increasingly harmonious and the heart’s “voice” can finally start to grow and expand, eager, ready and able to make audible all that it longs to share. And providing that the owner allows it to do so, out it comes through the heart, up the “channel” and out of the throat into audibility and into the world. Finally, we get to speak our truth, sharing how we really feel and feeling FREE, finally.

Now while this scenario is all rather poetic and wonderful, the reality for most people is that they don’t always want to voice what their heart really feels – especially if they perceive it as negative. And this can be for any number of reasons, such as fear of rejection, fear of hurting others, fear of asking for something they won’t get, fear of not being heard and so on. And of course many of us don’t want to own up to our truths to ourselves either – they have been buried for far too long and far too well underneath the barrage of chocolate chip cookies, burgers, fries, cheese, potatoes, bread and cake or any other emotionally numbing or highly stimulating food that you care to name (anything to distract us from the real work). And while this isn’t always why we eat, it certainly comes into play at least, I would say, 75% of the time that we eat for reasons not related to hunger.

So when we go raw, the channel starts to clear and sometimes, often times, we don’t always want to hear what’s trying to come up. So this is where support and guidance needs to come in, because we need to learn how to deal with these issues as they come up – as is the natural flow of things – without reaching for food or doing the complete opposite and getting angry and verbal at the world! Because if we don’t deal with whatever is coming up effectively then we absolutely will be driven to do something to make it all go back down. As it’s all energy, and energy needs to move, it has to move one way or another – so let’s go for the best case scenario and aim to make it a good, healthy, productive flow!

Bear this in mind if you’ve hit a wall with raw. It might just be that you’re on the verge of a major breakthrough – a whole new level of self-awareness, compassion, connection and understanding. I have found that often the biggest binge or eating backlash signposts that a huge shift is so close you can practically touch it – which is why we suddenly get panicky for no apparent reason and run, run, run to the larder! We sense how close we are and it’s feeling a little uncomfortable in there getting so close to the truth finally. Needless to say, “unexplainable” eating rampages can be upsetting and confusing, especially when we don’t have this information, so they can be incredibly challenging to try and deal with alone. The good news for you is that you don’t have to.

This takes us neatly on to step three.

STEP 3: If any of what I’ve discussed so far rings bells for you, then if you’re ready to face your truth here’s your opportunity to do things differently.

Break the pattern, take off the shackles and free yourself from inside. Where else is there to go anyway? We are now more than clear that you can’t eat your way out of sadness – not now, not ever – and this will remain. You deserve more than that. We all do. Break free. And the only way to freedom is up and out.

If you are anything like the majority of people addressing emotions properly for the first time, chances are you may not be ready to verbalise your true feelings to the world just yet, even to your partner or best friend, but there IS something you can do right now, completely privately that is guaranteed to help the healing process get set into motion and that will lead to increasing levels of peace and clarity for you. This is the next step I advised for Susan, Sarah, Miranda and Natasha as well as to untold other clients whose emotional pain had them running around in circles for decades, and this is the next step I am going to recommend for you. It’s a timeless classic, anyone can do it, and it costs nothing!

The Journaling Journey
I too had my fair share of emotional detox when I first got into my raw food journey. Back then I had no language for my experience, no explanation or understanding of what was going on inside me, in fact I didn’t even know the two were related, but regardless of that I knew on some level that holding the negative feelings inside me was certainly not going to help me on a “whole person” health level whatever diet I was eating.

Intuitively I very soon found myself writing pages and pages of thoughts, feelings and emotions into a sparkling new diary I felt compelled to buy. Journaling every day and night suddenly felt like something I just had to do; it became my lifeline, my confidante, the only way I could get rid of those feelings that were making me feel confused, sad and miserable, even though I had no clue why they were there. All I knew was that I had to get them out of my heart and out of my body, and as there was no-one I could speak to about it at the time, the only place left to expel them to was the pristine pages of my new best friend, my journal.

Years down the line the penny finally dropped as to why journaling is such a powerful force for healing and I’d love to share this with you now.

Returning once again to the more subtle or energetic way of seeing our amazing body, it is not so difficult to see that if we do not feel we can speak our truth through our throat at any given time, what we CAN do instead is to channel those emotions that need to be heard up to our throat THEN along to our shoulder, all the way down our arm, along through our hand, down into the pencil and out onto paper. By writing our feelings out (literally) in this way we give our heart an alternative pathway to channel this much needed emotional detox along – and it works.

A powerful image and understanding to have, right?

Well for me and all of the clients who have followed my suggestion, journaling has proved to be one of the most useful tools for freeing the burdens of the heart that has ever, and will ever, be invented. It is absolutely vital that we give our emotions at least ONE fully viable way out of our body, and for most of us that is going to mean through the throat or hand.
So, as far as your next step and what you can do alone, my top piece of advice for starting to break the pattern of comfort eating is of course to journal, journal, journal. Pour your heart out onto paper. Write, scribble, weep if you need to, but keep writing until you’ve struck the real truth that you can no longer deny. Keep digging until you just know that you’ve been completely and brutally honest about what’s bringing you down. As long as you are prepared to show up fully on paper, safe in the knowledge that it’s for your eyes only and your only assignment is to be 100% honest, then you will be giving yourself one of the biggest gifts you will ever give yourself – the gift of listening to your own heart. And for some of you this may be the first time ever.

Once you’ve got that far, congratulations! The hardest work, that vital first step, has been done – you’ve opened up, if only a little, and you’ve started to excavate. Great job!
Obviously from here there is further to go. This is just the first step towards your new found freedom.

STEP 4 is all about the owning. Once you have your thoughts and feelings out on paper then you’ll need to take full ownership of what’s real for you – but entirely without judgement or fear. When you know what you are dealing with, when you have held it up to the light and seen it for its good, bad and ugly, then, and only then, can you deal with it. At this point there is yet another very real danger of people thinking “Yikes! There is way more here than I thought!” and automatically the drive is there to self-medicate with food or drink again in order to go back to sleepy inertia and “blissful ignorance”.

But wait! There is one fool-proof way to move beyond this that really works, and will work no matter what your situation, pain or stress – and that is to take ACTION.

To be clear, it doesn’t matter what the action is, how big or small you perceive it to be, but to take any kind or size of action puts an even bigger space between your heart and the painful issues that have been bringing it down. When you take action you are quite literally moving towards what you DO want and therefore by default moving away from what you don’t want.

As I say, this is the point where people traditionally can have the tendency to turn tail and run, but here we have not only the potential to continue this incredible emotional detoxification process right until its end, but also the opportunity, the most amazing life-changing opportunity to learn first-hand that life really can and will support you when you go after your heart’s calling and move towards your own growth and joy.

This is something that was an incredible relief to me to discover. Sceptical at first of what is commonly known as “metaphysics”, taking on the belief that all things are connected and that “what you are seeking is also seeking you” was a bit of a hard pill to swallow at first, but ever the student I tested the theories on myself and my life just as I had done with raw foods and my body, and, my goodness, it worked! I found that each and every time I got clear in my head and genuinely excited and enthused in my heart, and then took action to move towards it, whatever I wanted would happen. (And this is why most, if not all, long term raw foodists love metaphysics, because they have figured this stuff out and know it’s vital for them to live this in order to stay inspired, stress-free and on track…).

With this door now wide open, it becomes a lot safer and generally more magical to blaze a trail towards emotional freedom. After all, if we can have what we want and get rid of what we don’t then life doesn’t have to be the struggle we thought it did, right?

This new knowledge, putting this theory to the test is therefore absolutely pivotal; after all, why would you bother to find out the secret longings and pains buried within your heart if you felt you did not have the power or opportunity to fully secure or free them?

Well, if you didn’t already have this knowledge under your belt, then I am here today to tell you that you do. You have the power to have or let go of anything you want. You are infinitely more powerful than you even realise (and ironically this can be yet another reason why we overeat or binge – fear of all that personal power coming up!).

For this reason, the fact that there is a truly wonderful route out of binge eating and stifling our own light, I have always maintained that there have been two major positive influences on my life: Raw food and metaphysics. When we learn how to work with our body via eating raw foods; how to free up the voice of our heart via journaling, speaking our truth, or even singing; and then allowing this new emotional energy to emerge out of our heart and then show up and create anew throughout the external fabric of our life creating so-called miracles, well, it really doesn’t get any better than this.

Because this is “woo woo” to some and yet I am utterly convinced that it’s simply quantum physics (like energies attract like, so align yourself with what you want internally so you can have it show up externally) I highly recommend that you invest in a copy of “The Game of Life and How To Play It” by Florence Scovel-Shinn. This tiny little book, rather amazingly written in 1925 and a metaphysics classic, speaks in such easy to understand terms that it makes metaphysics look like plain common sense - but what a difference this shift in understanding can make to our lives! Life isn’t out to get us after all…

STEP 5 then is to move into what you want as an ongoing lifestyle choice and let go of all that doesn’t support you. Learning to be good to yourself is vital at every stage of this process, but this should never end and in fact ideally should improve consistently the further and further you go. It may seem hard at first, but I can assure you it will get so much easier. As you “get this” more and more experientially you will find that your entire life will continue to upgrade as your diet, thoughts and emotions do the same.

And so, taking into account all of the five steps we have walked through together today, it’s hopefully now clear to see how and why we have the potential here to transform a former dysfunctional pattern of binge eating into something completely and utterly different – our potential.
As I said earlier, energy needs to move and does so regardless. This is a fact that will remain. Likewise, overeating or bingeing has never solved a problem, and often times has only made matters worse. This is a fact and will remain.

Taking into account these two facts and the awareness and understanding that you now have with us having taken this journey together, hopefully the path is now clear enough for you to see that the only way to freedom is the “up and out” approach, which means understanding the subtleties of the issue, getting clear, getting real, taking action, and keeping the positive heart-led movement going.

Now, while I’m ever the optimist I’m also very much a realist, and so I’m not saying all of the above will necessarily be easy (we are great at getting in our own way once things start going well, aren’t we?!) BUT it’s definitely more pleasurable than continuing the pattern and getting deeper and deeper into disorder. Besides, really, what is the alternative? A lifetime spent drowning your heart in chip fat? I think we’ve all been there, done that! And you don’t need me to tell you that it’s more fun to live a life fully alive (even if it does take a bit of effort to get there) than doing the slow waltz of the living stifled! It’s time to pull up your bootstraps, put your food back in the fridge and write your happy little heart out. This way freedom lies and so does your radically different future. You go get it!

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© 2008 Karen Knowler

Comments

[Gabriel Ward]

Fantastic wisdom Karen
Thank you so much for sharing your insights.

[Denise @ Raw Brides]

LOL - jam and salami sandwich!

Thanks for a great article Karen.

[Gabriel]

Really inspiring as always Karen.

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[Marie-Claire]

Congratulations Karen on a superbly written article, one that Id like to share with the world! Beautifully written and from the heart. Yours is the ONLY EZINE that I take the time to read regularly -ALWAYS inspirational AND FULLY ALIGNED to where I am at the moment! Thank you Marie-Claire
PS I am currently writing a book about "Mastering Clarity" Naturally Ill be mentioning Raw foods but at that point Id love to hand over to the expert! Could I include the above article, with your permission? Look forward to meeting you one day soon !

[Lindsey]

My heart is opening up and the pain is pouring out. Each paragraph triggers another release.

[Colleen]

OMG Karen!!
I am sobbing right now, as I try to find the words to say THANKYOU, in a way that truly expresses how I feel about the truths in this article.
I have always known that I am an emotional eater, but did not know how to stop. The best advice I have gotten is, "It will pass", or, "Just distract yourself". Neither worked for me, as the feelings were still there when I was done with whatever distraction I had chosen.
Now, I know why! I was simply following the same pattern of stuffing my feelings. Not with food, but with the extra activity I had chosen. Your wonderful insights in this article have SET ME FREE!! May the tears continue to flow. Let the cleansing begin!!

Many Bows,
Colleen

oh my word, that was very long but utterly ınspıred and eloquent and ı am left feelıng ... strange? ... ın a good way. thank you.