5 Ways to Deepen Your Connection with Your Body and Stop Overeating
Slimming down will involve deepening your connection with this beautifully imperfect body of yours, your one and only home.
My body was my enemy for 40 years.
I understand the challenge of feeling at odds with my own body all too well, a sentiment I delve into in my book, Beyond the Emptiness.
Do you relate to this frustration?
It breaks my heart to see overeaters like you exerting more willpower to control your eating. You’re frustrated by your rebellious body that does not listen to you. You try to control your eating only to find yourself eating more and gaining weight. Your struggle with food is not the problem but rather the consequence of your mind’s excessive control of your food and body. Your food craving is an escape from the discomforts you are experiencing in your body towards pleasure and safety.
When you focus on willpower, you are perpetuating a fight with your body and miss the opportunity to understand the limitations and true needs of your beautifully imperfect body.
Achieving harmony with your body shouldn't be complicated.
To help you escape this dilemma, I outline in this blog five ways to deepen your connection with your body so that you stop overeating. Further down, I am sharing with you links to useful resources that can help you befriend your body. You will find them as you keep reading.
Why am I writing this?
I truly believe that deepening your connection with your body will help you detect early signs of stress that push you to binge eating.
When you neglect your body’s cues, it rebels through overeating.
When you are divorced from your body, you don’t mind binge eating because your body does not feel yours.
I love this quote from Gibran Khalil Gibran which describes all too well the importance of inner harmony.
Fixing my relationship with food has involved making peace with my worst enemy: this body that I felt trapped in. I moved from living in my mind to learning how to operate in this one and only body of mine.
This journey has allowed me to understand my body, manage its needs, and neutralize my cravings.
5 Ways to Deepen Your Connection with Your Body and Stop Overeating
1) Cultivate a stronger connection and awareness of your body
Your body is constantly expressing itself, yet conditioning often prioritizes what your brain thinks and wants.
Imagine if your body cues informed your decision making, guiding you to your needs. Connecting with your body involves switching your attention inward towards the person you spend most time with: yourself! Pause and notice your thoughts, body sensations and emotions, even the unpleasant ones.
When you are receptive to the early signs of discomfort, you can address them before they become unbearable and lead you to binge eating.
Download my free body connection guide for overeaters to learn how to rebuild your body connection so that you manage stress and slim down
- LEARN the warning signs of body disconnection
- ASSESS the impact of fighting with your body on your overeating
- EXPERIENCE what it really means to connect to your body
2) Get acquainted with your suppressed emotions
You may be unaware of your emotions or you may try to control, ignore, minimize your emotions by considering them invalid or non-justified.
You end up paying the price of your emotional suppression by overeating.
Wouldn’t you love to manage your emotions outside of food?
Download my free emotional guide that will help you to develop emotional awareness.
3) Befriend your nervous system
When your nervous system is calm, you can cope with whatever is present right now and will not feel the need to overeat.
You overeat when your nervous system is overwhelmed. A built-in response gets activated in your body affecting how you think, feel and behave.
You might notice you’re in fight mode, experiencing moments of loosing your temper, engaging in frequent arguments, or becoming violent.
You might observe yourself in flight mode, feeling hyperactive and struggling to focus, sleep or rest.
You might recognize yourself in freeze mode, feeling tired, sleepy, lazy and detached from reality, engaging excessively in thoughts and imagination.
Please know there is nothing wrong with you, you’re just stressed.
While society conditions you to push through when struggling, the invitation is to slow down and take care of yourself before reaching for food.
4) Learn stress release techniques through breathwork
You binge when you are frozen or overwhelmed. You binge to escape and push away stress. You binge to have a different experience from the one you are having right now.
Imagine if you knew how to release stress instead of turning immediately to food.
Breathwork teaches you how to release stress and bring your body to a place of comfort and safety, through using the elements of breath, movement, sound, touch, and your senses.
Discover the power of biodynamic breathwork and trauma release
5) Explore new practices that bring comfort and calm to your nervous system
Pleasure is a skill. The more you practice attuning to it, the less you will need food as your only source of pleasure. As an overeater, you have a backlog of unmet needs to which you have substituted food as you go to pleasure.
Rather than soothe your mouth, try soothing your eyes, ears, skin and nose.
Experiment with sensory self-care practices
I hope this blog has given you ideas of growth areas that will help you deepen your connection with your body so that you stop overeating.
Having read this, if you’re thinking:
I would like to work cultivate a stronger connection and awareness of your body
I am keen to get acquainted with my suppressed emotions
I am eager to befriend my nervous system
I am looking for explore new practices that bring comfort and calm to my nervous system
Then I can help you scale up your self-care!
Tranquil Body is a 5-week program that teaches you how to detect early signs of stress and manage them before they lead you to binge eating.
Hi, I’m Rouba Chalabi,
I blend food addiction counseling with breathwork to help you heal the root cause of your food and body struggles so that you sustain weightloss.