Is There Hope for Your Eating Challenge?

If you’ve ever struggled with an unwanted eating challenge, you may have reached a point where you wondered if it would ever get better. And if you’ve worked on the same issue for years, if you’ve tried everything and still haven’t been able to make the changes you want, you might start to feel like there is no hope. If you’ve ever found yourself in that place, or if you know someone who has, please join us for this powerful new video from IPEtv where Emily Rosen, Director of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, shares 5 game-changing insights that can completely transform the way you approach any eating-related concern. You’ll come away with some fresh ideas and perspectives, and hopefully, a new sense of possibility. No matter what you’ve been dealing with, there is hope for you – and these key distinctions can help you regain your optimism.

In the comments below, please let us know your thoughts. We love hearing from you and we read and respond to every comment!

Here is a transcript of this week’s video:

Every day, I’m humbled by the sheer number and variety of eating challenges that so many people face. An eating challenge might mean that someone is simply eating the poor quality diet that’s pushed on us by the modern food industry, but that robs us of our birthright of true health. It could mean the desperate desire to lose weight, and the frustration of trying so many different diets without ever seeing sustainable results. Eating challenges could mean overeating, binge eating, disordered eating, and the many ways we reject our body and punish it through diet and exercise. And for so many people, the silent question that runs through these challenges every day is this: Is there hope for my eating challenge?

The simple truth is that there is always hope. Secretly hidden within every human challenge we will ever face are the seeds for its solution. Really.

So how can we find the beautiful remedy hidden deep within our eating challenges?

Let’s get right down to it. You deserve hope, and indeed hope is always trying to track you down, even in your darkest hours. But hope doesn’t so much rescue us as point us in the right direction, to the place where solutions are found. I’d like to offer you 5 suggestions for your eating challenge, various roads that can all lead to the place where hope transforms into healing. Maybe one of these will resonate with you.

1 – Change Your Worldview

One of the first steps to finding hope with whatever concern you might be facing is to notice where your worldview needs to change. We get locked into apathy and despair the moment we believe in a universe that either doesn’t care, or even worse, is out to get you. It’s easy to think that we’re alone in our suffering, and that no one could possibly understand what we’re going through. To find hope, at some point, we have to see the world through fresh eyes. We have to notice the kinds of limiting beliefs that keep us locked into a cycle of pain and frustration. Rigidity is death. Flexibility is life.

2 – Food Challenges Are Not Just About Food

As odd as it may sound, a majority of our food challenges are not truly about food. Yes, the simple act of eating in a way that nourishes and does not harm us can be far more difficult than it would seem. But at their core, our challenges with food go deeper, and are much more interesting. In other words, overeating doesn’t mean we have a willpower issue and we need to learn to control our appetite. Our inability to change our body to be exactly how we want it to be isn’t because we simply need to get better at diet and exercise. Our challenges with food, body and weight have a purpose. They have a something to teach us. Which leads us to this next place:

3 – Food is a Doorway

Our challenges with food, body, health, and weight are essentially a doorway. It’s easy to stay on the doorstep doing all kinds of dieting, exercise, or strategies that ultimately don’t work, wondering why we can’t find an opening. Knock on the door. It opens right away… And suddenly, you’ll find yourself in a new place with new possibilities. The doorway of our food challenges might lead us to where the real healing needs to happen – unhappiness in a relationship, past hurts or abuses, unfulfilled desires, a lack of connection, the need for greater purpose in life, and so much more. One of the principles of Dynamic Eating Psychology is that food is a symbolic place where we enact these life challenges when we are unable to confront them head-on. The door is always open to you.

4 – Food is Teaching Us, Helping Us Grow

Once we walk through that door, we see that our relationship with food is here to teach us and help us grow. There’s nothing wrong with us because we have a food, weight, or body challenge. Life is a classroom, and for many of us, food is one of our most faithful teachers. If you’re willing to be a student, the learning will be forthcoming. For many people, this is a significant and powerful change in worldview. If we want true hope for our eating challenge, then we need to see that despite the difficulty of it, there is a hidden benevolent function within it. It’s doing its best to be a great teacher for us. And with great teaching comes deep and valuable learning.

5 – There’s Something Greater Going On

If you want to accelerate the process of finding hope for whatever eating issue you might face, the most important step is to awaken to the possibility that there is something greater going on. There’s a wisdom to life that’s intelligent, thoughtful, and profoundly more clever than anyone of us. If we believe in a random, loveless, chaotic and meaningless universe – then this will be our experience of life, and continued suffering is practically guaranteed. This, then, is perhaps the greatest shift that any of us could make. We can never fully understand the forces of fate, destiny, and cosmic intelligence. But if we choose, we can experiment with being humble in the face of it all, and do our best to respond to how life is laying out our grand education. Look around you at the magic of the world, notice it every day, and remember that no matter how challenging your eating concern might be, it’s secretly guiding you into your greatness.

I hope this was helpful.

Warmly,
Emily Rosen