The current state of the world can bring up so many emotions of fear, uncertainty, and confusion. I’ve been finding myself opening and closing my fridge more times than I need to just to deal with the chaos of my mind. I mindlessly rummage through the fridge, tempted to pick up a snack and eat my way to feeling like everything is okay. This is stress eating at its finest.

These are the patterns that so many of us can fall into when we are all dealing with such a huge amount of collective fear and uncertainty. We are craving support and we are craving comfort. 

In other words, we need each other. We need each other because we don’t know what’s on the other side of this. We need each other because we don’t know what we don’t know. 

Emotional Eating, Comfort Eating, Stress Eating

Emotional eating, comfort eating, and stress eating is at an all-time high with the current state we find ourselves in. We are unable to connect face-to-face and we are in isolation, left with menacing thoughts that torment us into believing that we need food as a drug to make it through these times. We have triggers all around us and states of fear and stress are soaring high, but that doesn’t mean we need to give in to this collective thought of scarcity. 

We have the power to choose, even in moments when we feel as though we don’t.

Here’s a question to ask yourself:

Are you being motivated by fear or love?

Motivation is why we do the things we do. It gives us our strength to experience the life that we want and deserve. Whether you rely on fear or love is a crucial part of understanding your own body image and disordered eating issues.

Fear

In moments like these, we can find ourselves scared of not having enough — like when we pillage the local grocery store for toilet paper and enough food to feed the entire left hemisphere of the world. These actions are motivated by fear. When we constantly turn to food as a way to cope with what we are feeling, we are being motivated by fear — fear of discomfort, fear of not-enoughness, and the list could go on and on.

Love

When we are taking action from a place of love, we are activating abundance, light, and truth. When we are motivated by love we can be patient and forgiving to ourselves for the struggles that we go through. We come from compassion, not self-punishment (like fad diets or over-exercise). When we are fueled by self-love, stress eating isn’t an option because we are in the space of actually taking care of our bodies. We are doing what’s best for our health, not thinking about how we can lose weight. 

Fear or Love?

Ask yourself: Am I afraid?

This will create a visceral response within your body that can lead you to the answer.

Ask yourself: Is this the best option for my health and well-being?

This will align you with your own truth about where you’re at with your health.

Trust Yourself

It all boils down to being able to trust yourself. You build trust within yourself through repeated actions of commitment like sticking to your word about eating for your health or shifting your self-talk to be positive. Be nice to yourself when you want to stress eat. Be nice to yourself when you are hurting. Just be nice to yourself. 

Forgiveness is another aspect of trust. Forgive yourself when you f*ck things up — you are human to learn, grow, and evolve, if we didn’t mess things up every once in awhile, why would we be here?