Emotional Eating Challenges? Explore Your Relationship with Food. With Amber Romaniuk.
Oct 15, 2024
auto_awesome
Amber Romaniuk, an expert in emotional eating and hormone balance, shares her personal journey of overcoming binge eating. She highlights how many people may not recognize their food-related triggers until it's too late. Discussions include the role of childhood experiences and stress in developing unhealthy eating habits. She emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and mindfulness in fostering a healthier relationship with food. Additionally, Amber explores how hormonal imbalances can complicate emotional eating, particularly for women.
Understanding the roots of emotional eating, particularly childhood experiences and trauma, is crucial for overcoming unhealthy coping mechanisms with food.
Recognizing hormonal imbalances and establishing regular, balanced eating patterns can significantly improve one's relationship with food and emotional well-being.
Deep dives
The Impact of Childhood Experiences on Eating Habits
Childhood experiences play a significant role in shaping adult eating habits, often leading to emotional eating. For instance, bullying can create lasting impressions on self-image, as highlighted by the speaker's experience being called 'fat and ugly' in childhood. This early trauma can lead individuals to seek comfort in food, forming unhealthy coping mechanisms. Understanding these roots is crucial for overcoming emotional eating later in life.
Defining Emotional Eating and Food Addiction
Emotional eating refers to consuming food for reasons beyond physical hunger, such as boredom or sadness, while food addiction represents a more severe obsession with food. The absence of self-love often drives both behaviors, causing individuals to fill emotional voids with eating. Different triggers can intensify emotional eating, leading to binge eating, where individuals lose control over their consumption. Recognizing and defining these behaviors is a critical first step toward healing.
The Complexity of Hormonal and Digestive Health
Hormonal imbalances and digestive health are intertwined and can exacerbate emotional eating challenges. Elevated cortisol from stress can impair digestion and lead to inflammation, which in turn may exacerbate cravings and emotional eating. Many women experience these issues due to negative feedback loops created by dietary restrictions, emotional triggers, and hormone dysfunctions. Understanding this complexity is key to addressing the underlying causes of eating challenges.
Strategies for Healing Relationships with Food
To improve one's relationship with food, it's essential to establish regular eating patterns that incorporate balanced meals rich in proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Mindful eating practices can help individuals reconnect with their hunger cues while developing awareness around triggers. Additionally, keeping a trigger journal can assist in recognizing patterns that lead to emotional eating. Seeking professional guidance and support is also advisable for navigating this complex journey toward food freedom.
Todays guest is Amber Romaniuk, an expert in emotional and binge eating, digestive issues and hormones. Over the last several years, she’s helped thousands of women overcome their own eating challenges, calm digestion, lose weight and balance their hormones so they are happier, healthier and can lead more productive lives.
In this interview she says — many of us have a story about our relationship with food. And She shares how she used food as a coping mechanism herself in her 20’s and how she had to hit rock bottom before recovering from her own binge eating behaviors. Often we’re not even aware that we have a problem — or what it is that is triggering us — until it becomes serious. She discusses how we can become more aware of our triggers, change how we perceive our own bodies, notice the negative self talk that can become our background chatter… and how all of this impacts our relationship with food.
Resources: Amberapproved.ca
As always, we’re Untangle, the podcast from Muse, the brain sensing headband dedicated to unlocking your brains potential AND Meditation Studio the five star app.