How To Have A Better Relationship With Food

There are many factors that can affect a person's relationship with food, and this webinar explores the key emotional, behavioural, social, biological and nutritional aspects.

Food can become a coping mechanism for stress, boredom, loneliness, anxiety or lack of fulfilment, or it can be used as a form of reward or to get a dopamine 'hit'. Each person has their own unique relationship with food, and building better self-awareness and insight can help to demystify things, provide clarity and enable the individual to identify strategies for positive change.

Food and eating can therefore symbolise different things to different people. For example, it can be a way to relax or have a break, it can be a way of connecting socially, it can have a calming, distracting or numbing effect when things feel difficult or overwhelming, it can be a way to reward oneself, a way to put things off (procrastinate), provide escapism, and it can even be a form of self-punishment.

Categorising foods as 'good' or 'bad', too many restrictive food rules, all-or-nothing thinking and feelings of guilt and shame around eating can fuel a difficult relationship with food. Once you become aware that binge eating or even just mindless eating/grazing is often a symptom of something- a reaction to a stressful situation, ongoing relationship, work, physical or mental health issues, some deep-seated urge to comfort yourself with food, or feeling deprived or frustrated due to years of too many food rules, you can start being kinder to yourself and find effective strategies to address your true needs, rather than using food as a sticking plaster.

Perhaps you're an emotional eater, a binge eater, secret eater, mindless grazer or yo-yo dieter, and don't know where to start. This webinar is for anyone who wants to improve their relationship with food, providing in-depth information and advice about some of the key underlying causes, and how to start building a self-help 'tool box' to help you to address problematic eating habits, tackle the daily food battle and to feel more at peace.

The webinar will help you to:-

~ Identify factors that have influenced your relationship with food over time, including mindset (attitudes, beliefs, thought patterns, values), history of dieting, mental health and childhood messages

~ Explore key emotional eating triggers and the 'two brains' (thinking brain vs. emotional brain)- how your emotional brain might hijack you in certain situations and how to activate your thinking brain to help you avoid knee-jerk reactions to sudden food cravings

~ Pinpoint how and why you might use food as a coping mechanism, and how to start problem-solving and addressing your TRUE needs

~ Acknowledge that to have a better relationship with food, you need to have a better relationship with yourSELF

~ Learn effective mindful eating practises to help you navigate around the food environment, move away from all-or-nothing thinking and restrictive dieting practises to more 'middle-way' eating, and choose foods that help you to feel fuller for longer

~ Understand how to make new habits stick- the key element required (and it's not willpower!)

~ Realise that it's important to consider the 'whole picture' when it comes to understanding your relationship with food- eating habits, body image, self-worth, lifestyle, personality, mental health and past experiences are just some of the topics that you need to explore.

The webinar includes a detailed handout (Powerpoint slides) and a comprehensive questions and exercises handout emailed to you after the webinar, enabling you to go back through the material and try out exercises in your own time.

PLEASE NOTE: If you're unable to join the event live, or prefer to listen to the recording in your own time, by purchasing a ticket the recording will be sent to you after the event. As with any webinar run via Zoom, if you attend, please be aware that your full name may be visible from your Zoom screen to anyone else attending live or to anyone watching the recording after the event, depending on your own Zoom set-up (data privacy caution). You will have the option of keeping your video on or off.

Comments from previous webinar attendees and clients who have benefitted from my teaching and support:-

“I didn’t realise just how much eating and mental health are connected.”

"I was fed up…really very fed up…of eating all the time- and wondering what was wrong with me. Emma helped me to see that I was eating to fulfil deep emotional needs that went way back. Now, I work on fulfilling my emotional needs another way and find things to do that I truly enjoy. It’s a pleasure to enjoy food as just food."

“I found this course really good at focusing my mind on what I’m eating. I particularly found the exercise looking at my childhood helpful, and how that has affected my adult eating habits.”

“Emma helped me to recognise how overeating had become a way of numbing my emotions.”