Beating the munchies!

What I have learnt through learning to relax has been that when I calm down and breathe into my belly, I can go over it and simply don’t feel the need to nibble.

Our genes remember a time when we had to hunt and scrape a living from the land and food was hard to come by, we were often hungry, so in one way we overeat out of fear of starvation.  This need for oral gratification is a deep rooted and is hard wired into the mainframe with most of us.

Whenever I get that feeling of emptiness, I don’t mean hunger, its a restless emptiness, I just can’t relax to eat properly.  I don’t know how to cope, how to feel fulfilled and peaceful.  I used to suffer from anxiety and work related stress and was very emotionally unstable, so food was one of the tools I used to help to change my mood.
Salty things like chips or peanuts when I am depressed and sweet things when I feel a bit moody and need some love replacement.It’s an emotional or even deeper than that sort of emptiness that I felt, some kind of soul pain deep inside of me.

I just didn’t know how to cope, how to feel fulfilled and peaceful.What I have learnt through learning to relax has been that when I calm down and breathe into my belly, I can go over it and don’t get “the munchies” anymore.I’ve worked out after years of struggling with bad eating habits myself, that our attitude to food is really a reflection of how we live our lives.   It’s often to distract ourselves from the real issues that we are not able to face, that we pick at things, we dislike foods which reflects our dissatisfaction with life.  So when we eat nervously, we are unable to let ourselves enjoy life and really get involved, it’s a very useful way of becoming clearer about ourselves and to see our behavior.

Bad eating habits, equals a poor ability to digest life itself!

The times I felt happy and balanced, my diet too was pretty good and I had an appetite and enjoyed sharing meals.  However as soon as I become upset, stressed and emotional it goes and I don’t eat properly.  For many people I see it’s a comfort thing, it makes us feel safe and better and supplies some form of extra energy and covers up easily as it is socially acceptable, as we all have to eat.

Whenever I felt nervous or anxious about something, I immediately need to eat something and anything would do and I ‘m not even hungry.  It’s unfortunately usually not something extremely healthy that I conjure up at these times, rather a bar of chocolate, or some biscuit.  It’s not just us ladies who reach for the chocolates and sweets when we are stressed either I know plenty of guys who have this problem too.

It’s partly a lifestyle thing as well, now with the trend for skipping lunch and grabbing a sandwich at your desk, we don’t relax and allow our bodies to digest properly as our stomachs are full of tension and our livers are not peaceful, so the problem develops and we become uncomfortable when we eat and so it goes.

This is where “the munchies” strike, often late at night, after a few drinks or when we have been stressed. Understanding that my body was not actually hungry, it was just low on energy, plus learning relaxation techniques from an instructor, has helped me to balance my eating habits and I am getting back into healthier ways and have lost some weight too.

Have you problem with munchies too? Check out our recording made by Gwen, Relax While You Eat