Why Your Food Behaviors Are NOT the Problem. Here's the Real Culprit...

​The number one question I often get asked in sessions is, "What is the somatic practice I should be doing to calm myself down?"

Somatic and nervous system work has been completely misconstrued and misrepresented, and I get why. 

If all you're seeing on social media is a list of suggestions on practices you can do to make things better or calm yourself down, it can feel like there is some magical tool you can utilize to hack your body. Then all the discomfort would go away, which would perhaps decrease how much you're leaning on food.

But, what if you had the utmost confidence that you could be with and flow through any emotion, sensation, feeling, or state? Do you imagine you would have the same reactions you have now with food?

What if your urges, impulses, and patterns with food had nothing to do with decreasing the food behavior, but rather increasing your capacity to embody?

Ever since I realized that it wasn't really about the food but my intense avoidance of feeling my body, I've been in a deep commitment to myself to create a relationship with discomfort. Recently, I completed a little experiment for myself with discomfort. 

For those of you who don't know, my husband and I take a lot of road trips with our Airstream. We decided to drive east in October to visit family and are currently still hanging out east. With all of the driving we were doing, the packed days, the PhD papers that were due, continuing to have sessions, launch another round of the Somatic Eating® Program, and put out podcasts, there was very little time to move my body, which I often put as a top priority in my day. 

But rather than pushing myself to try to fit it in, I wondered what it might be like to grow my capacity to be with the discomfort of not moving my body very much. This went on for maybe about two weeks until I had a bit more time to even fit in a walk. So during those two weeks, I simply observed what the discomfort felt like. My legs felt jittery, my chest at times felt tight, my heart rate would go up and down, some moments I felt moodier than I typically would be. Being with the discomfort gave this expansive feeling though of I'm just having a human moment. It won't be here forever and I have the capacity to be with this and move through this. 

I didn't need to lash out. I didn't need to push it away. I had no craving to reach for food also knowing that wouldn't make anything any better or different. This discomfort wasn't something to fix or change. It just was. And, the more I welcomed it in, the faster the experience of discomfort would move along. I didn't do any typical somatic practice. I didn't shake, I didn't hug or rock myself, I didn't do any cold exposure, I simply let the feelings and sensations coexist with me. Sometimes these sensations would stick around longer than other moments, but I would always see them eventually go away. 

Food behaviors like binge eating or restriction are often a response to what you're sensing and feeling.

If your capacity is low to be with this bodily experience, food comes in to help you. Eating can provide a momentary shift in how you feel by increasing parasympathetic nervous system activation, dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin. And as a reminder, your capacity became low because of things like past trauma which made your window of tolerance smaller and even shrank your prefrontal cortex, where you engage in rational thought. This isn't a personal failure. It is not that you can't handle discomfort. You can. It is just that your body doesn't know how yet. 

There is a study I reference in my Somatic Eating® Program ​where researchers found that when seeking discomfort, people spontaneously reappraise discomfort as a positive cue, even when not explicitly prompted to do so. Perceiving negative experiences as a sign of progress ​was motivating when positive experiences are delayed and discomfort is immediate.​ So what does all that mean? Basically, when you go after discomfort as a sign of growth, it can start to be experienced as a beneficial and welcomed bodily experience. Discomfort is also more of an immediate felt sense, so for those of you needing some fast gratification that your efforts are doing something, feeling the discomfort can be a quick sign that what you're doing could be leading you toward what you want. 

​Rather than experiencing the discomfort then as something to alter, you can start to see it as bodily feedback that something is changing. Now, there is a fine line with this because discomfort is also sometimes telling you what doesn't feel safe or in alignment so the context matters here. And, you don't want to push yourself too far into discomfort that then all of your food coping mechanisms increase to turn down the inner volume on what you're feeling. I like to see it as gently nudging the line of your window of tolerance so it slowly gets to grow. 

​Food and body image behaviors in this process though can start to become a scapegoat.

A focus on what's wrong with what, when, and how you're eating or how you look doesn't give an opportunity to dig a little deeper. It can keep you focused on the surface level concern without exploring what is your body trying to communicate through these behaviors and impulses. Now obviously we explore here the layers and layers of what your body could be communicated, but it could simply be saying, I feel uncomfortable and I haven't learned that this is alright and how to move through this yet. 

​As I described earlier, sometimes there is nothing fancy that you have to do with discomfort. When I first started growing my capacity to be with discomfort, it started with a lot of movement. Lots of walking and dancing and lifting weights. Now, I can name it and just be with it and imagine discomfort pulling up a chair and saying, "Hey, what's up? Can I chill?"

The last piece I want to name is that discomfort can become your friend. It is informing you of growth, of boundaries broken, of what you want, of what you need, of what needs to be spoken up for. So you might start to see discomfort as your ally so that when it shows up, you can start to interpret its presence not as a sign that you're in danger but that your body is trying to tell you something and you don't want to drown that out with food because then you'll never get to hear what your body has to say. 

As always, if you're ever looking for more support in this work, email me at support@stephaniemara.com anytime. I hope this helped to provide a new lens to any food behavior you're navigating and have a satiating and safety producing rest of your day. Bye!