Reconnecting with the Past to Address Your Food Insecurity or Overwhelming Focus on Dieting and your Body Binge Dieting

Reconnecting with the Past to Address Your Food Insecurity or Overwhelming Focus on Dieting and your Body  In this episode, I discuss how our experiences in our younger years shape our body image and relationship with food. Many of these experiences may have contributed to how you behave and feel around food and your body as an adult. Using the model of internal family systems, you can reconnect with your experiences and find more inner peace. In time, you will be less triggered by comments or experiences that once made your body contract or freeze and your mind ruminate. 
Tune in to the episode to learn how you might work on your relationship with food and your body by exploring the root of your food insecurity or your overactive need to diet.
Also, consider joining my online class to help you learn how to help yourself get out of stressful eating habits. For more information go to www.betsythurstonrd.com. 
Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Identify when and how your food insecurity started. Discover how reconnecting with your past experiences can help you in your journey to healing. Learn how helpful it can be to have more understanding and compassion for yourself and your inner child. Resources Mary O’Malley Episode Highlights Feeling Flawed and Having Food Insecurity As an adult, you may have developed an image or belief that you are flawed because of your body and how you feel and act around food. You don’t trust yourself around food, and you might avoid it as much as you can. You might also have periods of secretly overeating. Shame and fear of judgment might happen daily. 
Getting to the Root of the Problem When there’s a fear of being fat or a history of long-term dieting, more often than not, there is an initial source of wounding. And this is often rooted in childhood experiences or sometimes times in college or early adulthood. 
You may have been surrounded by real or perceived judgments around your body, or you might have been flooded with internal judgment. Other people’s fear for their own bodies may have been projected onto you. These experiences may be traumatizing and have resulted in you feeling inadequate, creating an internal obsession over your weight and body. 
Explore the Past We can always explore the past with awareness of the present. Tapping into the memories of your younger years could help you heal from issues surrounding your weight and body. 
By learning to connect with the root of your fears and food insecurity, you gain more understanding and compassion for yourself in your journey to recovery. 
Separate Threat from Trigger Growing up surrounded by body critics may have led you to watch your food intake and obsess over every little change in your body. For instance, a slight hint of being bloated might set you into panic and hypervigilance. Yet feeling bloated is completely normal; it’s a part of digestion.
The part of your mind that takes over in this way actually believes you’re in grave danger. It wants to save you from the early memories of shame and hurt. But these parts can create hyper vigilance and dieting habits, which can be very demanding and destructive. It's important to learn how to separate the threat from the trigger and calm the internal noise in your head. 
Connect with the Quiet Space Within You One of my clients came to me when she was in her late 30s. She’d been on every diet on the planet. But she still felt defeated and disappointed. She knew it was very exhausting to live in deep fear of having a certain body type and obsessing over what she was eating. 
What we started to do was to talk about the practicalities of food and a bit on intuitive eating. Then we were led to memories of when she was a little girl who’d experienced being bullied about her body. She was able to get in touch with this critical energy from a curious place. 
Through a specific process, she reconnected with her inner chil