• Certain diets like Keto, Paleo, or plant-based diets can be therapeutic for the body — whether we stay on them over the long-term or use them as tools to recalibrate our health. Whatever our approach to eating may be, it’s important to recognize that these diets don’t address the psychological drivers behind our eating challenges.
• Taking this a step further, we can’t fix eating challenges — which stem from our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs — using nutrition alone. To address unwanted eating habits such as binge eating or emotional eating, we need to understand and ultimately transform our psychology.
• A common way we stay stuck in our eating challenges is by self-attacking ourselves that we have these challenges in the first place. This negative self talk can be truly endless. If you find yourself saying things like “why can’t I just get over this already?” or “I’m terrible at controlling myself around food,” it’s time to bring loving attention to these thoughts.
• Look for where you can begin to make small shifts in your internal self talk. Where can you acknowledge your efforts and your progress, no matter how small? Recognizing the shifts you’re making helps solidify those positive changes over time. 
• No matter what your brain may try to convince you of, remember you're a unique and wonderful human. You’re not broken, there’s nothing to fix. Keep reminding yourself of this … eventually, you’ll feel the truth of that in your bones.

Overcoming The Belief That We’re Not Worthy Of Health

• Eating challenges are often strongly correlated with our culture’s unique conditioning. Depending on we’re from, the expectations placed on us to look or eat a certain way can be quite severe.
• Overcoming cultural conditioning first requires an awareness of it. We need to recognize: “there’s something driving me to behave in a certain way or believe in a certain idea, that didn’t originate from me. It came from outside me.” Once we’ve identified unwanted conditioning, we can then start to get to work on letting it go.
• It’s possible to honor and respect our lineage, culture, and parents while still being our own person. Choosing to not meet outside expectations isn’t a rejection of others, it’s simply a decision to honor ourselves and what’s best for us.
• Disembodiment is a strategy for not feeling things we don’t want to feel. It can be related to pressures from others to look or act a certain way, a response to trauma or painful life circumstances, or even just everyday disappointments and let downs.
• We ultimately heal disembodiment by bringing conscious awareness of all the big and small ways we “check out” of the body. We take each day at a time, loving ourselves, our bodies, and our lives as fully as we can. We listen, we tune in, and we respond to the messages our bodies and hearts are sending us.

What’s The Connection Between PTSD & Emotional Eating?

• Regardless of the cause, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can give rise to emotional eating and other unwanted eating challenges. It is the brain’s way of trying to cope with past traumas.
• When under stress, our natural instinct is to self soothe. One of the easiest ways to do this is to turn to food. This is both normal and natural, and this is nothing to beat yourself up about.
• Eating is an emotional experience. From birth, we are hard wired to experience joy, comfort, and nourishment through eating. 
• We often respond to stress by eating. And guess what? This isn’t always a bad thing. It’s time to get off the self-judgment train, while also discovering other ways to create a relaxation response in our bodies. As we do this, the impulse to reach for food in times of stress diminishes.
• Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a powerful therapeutic technique for transforming PTSD. If you’re dealing with persistent PTSD, finding a therapist who specializes in EMDR is highly recommended.

• Contrary to what many believe, binge eating is not a problem. It doesn’t need fixing. It’s simply a strategy to deal with another issue we don’t know how to address.
• An important thing to understand about the binge-purge cycle: binge eating creates physiologic and psychological stress, which purging then relieves. 
• Repressing negative emotions like anger or sadness can lead us to engage in any number of unwanted eating challenges, including binging and purging. Find healthy ways to honor your emotions, such as listening to music that has special meaning for you, or regularly journaling your thoughts and feelings.
• Learning to bring conscious awareness in the moment when we’re about to binge eat is absolutely key to transforming this unwanted behavior. What are we thinking about? What emotions are we feeling? What do we feel in the body? Tune into this.
• Show yourself generosity for the progress you make and celebrate your success. Acknowledge that you’ll have setbacks, and bring the self-forgiveness forward that you so deeply deserve.