Eating Your Anger - Weight Loss and Tapping into Self-Care

Eating your anger – Weight loss and tapping into self care by CiCi Collins Anger Management Consultant and Advanced EFT practitioner

You have an argument with your partner, a parent, one of your children, a sibling, friend or work colleague. You are very angry and find yourself heading towards the kitchen. You reach for the cupboard where you store your hoard of “forbidden” foods. You open up the biscuits. And so a familiar pattern begins to repeat itself. For some, anger and eating are inextricably linked. If we have been brought up in an environment where anger is not expressed, then the chances are that it will be difficult for us to express our anger, so we will implode, turn the anger in on ourselves. However if the preferred style for expressing anger for those around us when we were younger was to explode, the “explosion” can trigger anxiety, and that in turn can lead to a episode of emotional overeating.

As an Anger and Stress Management Consultant, I am regularly working with individuals whose relationship with anger is a challenging one. Link that with emotional overeating and you have a potentially highly destructive combination. Overeating when angry just serves to anesthetise our feelings, and ultimately can be personally very damaging.

So why do we get angry? There are four main sources that trigger our anger:
The loss of a personal goal, for example when we lose a job, miss a train or arrive late for a meeting, the invasion of a personal boundary, when someone enters without permission or touches us when we have not given then permission, self defence anger, when we feel the need to defend ourselves for whatever reason, and finally when someone mirrors something that we don’t like or feel comfortable about ourselves.

To begin to address our anger is to begin an exciting journey of self discovery. To acknowledge your anger in the first place is the first step. Eating will only serve to keep us in a vicious circle.

Anger is undoubtedly one of the main causes of emotional overeating. So if as in the example above, you stifle your anger by eating “comfort” food, you may inadvertently see the scales begin to go up. I am always intrigued by the expression “comfort” food which ultimately seem to cause so much discomfort with so many of the clients that I meet. The food, whatever it may be, can be very seductive, helping us to escape from the feelings of fear, hurt or powerlessness that may be present but ultimately just keeping those emotions down. And of course society doesn’t always encourage us to express our anger. It must be one of the greatest misunderstood emotions of all times. And the more we eat the more the anger can build. The more we try to ignore it or pretend that it isn’t there, the more damaging it can be. Because, whether we face it or not, it is there, and if it is not doing its damage externally, it will definitely be doing it internally, either physically or psychologically, or both.

Our anger is linked to our needs. We will get angry if our needs are not met. Our anger will be triggered if we think we are not being heard, not being acknowledged or understood. We have a need for community and friendship, so if we are feeling isolated and alone we may take solace in food. It can become a friend, who is always there and never lets us down. But then of course as we see the scales go up we feel angry, hopeless and defeated, and can turn the anger on ourselves.

So what could we do to address anger and overeating? We could start by stopping and asking ourselves, “How do I feel right now with this situation?” Many of us never give ourselves the time to ask ourselves this question, to take a deep breath and make a rational decision of what to do next – what to do next that will be for my higher good, and actually, everyone else. Follow that up with and “What do I need right now?” we may begin to unravel our relationship with anger, and as a result food.

We could also begin to identify for ourselves whether our eating is because we are hungry, or has an emotional component. If we are hungry, the message will come from our stomach. It may be rumbling or our energy may be depleted. If it is emotional the message will come from our head. If we are hungry, it is probably because we haven’t eaten for several hours, but we can delay it also if we need too. If it is emotional, it will develop suddenly and no amount of food will be enough; we may have just eaten a big meal but still tuck into maybe a particular type of food that we eat when feeling emotional. If we are hungry we will have a feeling of satisfaction after a meal. If it is emotional we will probably continue to eat even though we feel full and then feel disgust and shame. Our shame is also highlighted because much of this eating is done in private, when the family or flatmates have gone to bed.

This too is where EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) really addresses the anxiety around anger. By gently tapping on established meridians in the body virtually every client that I have ever worked with feels an immediate sense of calm. By giving themselves permission to say “Even though I feel angry right now, I accept myself and all my feelings”, this simple set up phrase allows us to be honest and open about our feelings whilst at the same time accepting ourselves and our choosing to do differently.

In a recent article Oprah Winfrey spoke about how she had let slip all the measures that she had put in place to keep her healthy and fit, as her punishing schedule took over and her weight began to increase. She said, “I do not have a weight problem, I have a self care problem.” Through deconstructing our anger, finding out what really is causing us to punish ourselves with food and using EFT on a regular basis, we can begin to feel a freedom around food, and to take care of ourselves with a more loving compassionate approach to our daily challenges and our anger, in a healthy powerful and affirming way.

Please contact CiCi Collins at info@weighout.co.uk for all the Weigh Out courses that address emotional eating at www.weighout.co.uk CiCi was recently seen as the Stress Consultant on Channel 4’s Celebrity Wife Swap.
Her own website is www.cicicollins.co.uk