When Food Becomes a Place to Hide

Sometimes it’s not about the food at all.

You open the fridge and stare blankly. You’re not even hungry.

You just… don’t know what else to do.

Maybe the day was heavy.

Maybe someone said something that hurt.

Maybe it’s just that quiet kind of sadness that doesn’t have a name.

And food?

Food is there. It’s always there. It doesn’t talk back. It doesn’t judge us and it will never leave us.

It gives us something to do with our hands when our feelings are “too big” to deal with.

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It’s not a weakness. It’s an attempt at self-soothing.

So many of us have been taught to believe that turning to food to comfort ourselves is due to a huge lack of willpower or because we’re a failure.

But it’s not.

It’s a strategy.

It’s a way our brains learned to soothe and help us survive when the world felt like too much.

We all develop coping mechanisms. Some people go for a run.

Some people shut down. Some people scroll endlessly.

And some of us, many of us eat. You and I, we’re food people.

It’s not because we’re broken.

It’s because we’re human.

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So What Do We Do With That?

Healing from emotional overeating isn’t about giving up food as a coping mechanism and being feeling vulnerable.

It’s about gently building new ways to feel safe in our bodies, in our feelings, and in our day.

That might mean:

• Letting ourselves pause before eating and asking, “What do I actually need right now?”
• Allowing a feeling to be felt without needing to “fix” it.
• Slowly learning how to sit with uncomfortable feelings without covering them up with food.

None of this happens overnight.

And none of it needs to happen perfectly. As you and I both know, perfection doesn’t exist.

But every time we choose to be courageous and sit with our challenging feelings in that moment, we’re growing another ounce of tenacity in our reliance on our Self to be ‘enough’ just in this moment.

And if we do this for several hundred moments, those challenging feelings will no longer be challenging and we will have grown enormously in our capacity to trust ourselves.

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We’re Allowed to Take Up Space in the World

We don’t need to ‘earn’ a break.

We don’t need to shrink ourselves physically or emotionally to be a valid person with real worth.

Our needs matter.

Our feelings matter.

And our relationship with food isn’t a problem to solve, it’s a gently unfolding story. We can value every new page and every new paragraph we discover within and sprinkle a few sparkling granules of compassion on our Self along the way.

Lord knows, we all need a little more kindness in our every day lives. And I think if Kindness were a colour, it would have to be Pink!

The trick is to start with ourselves first, in tiny, weeny baby steps…

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