Food and Feelings: January 2007 Archives
Sufficiency. It's a word that's creeping into your vocabulary as you learn intuitive eating. Are you sufficiently hungry to warrant a meal? Maybe only sufficiently hungry to tide yourself over until dinner with a small snack?
Sufficiency applies to fullness, too. You decide whether you're sufficiently full of each food you crave to put the napkin down and turn your attention elsewhere.
But sufficiency has another meaning, too, for folks learning intuitive eating. Chances are, if you've had food problems in the past, you probably struggle with feeling feelings.
Are you allowing yourself to feel them sufficiently so that you're not tempted to numb them with food? In fact, there is a sufficient amount of feeling feelings that we can do.
Let's say you just embarrassed yourself, or to word it more accurately to match how we often feel, you embarrassed yourself to death.
Instead of running to food, you try and sit with your yucky feeling. Yet you're thinking, "Who needs it? Should I really wallow in this? Trash myself over it?"
This is where sufficiency comes in. You can feel the feeling, notice it, even find it curious. "Gosh, I'm really feeling ashamed and embarrassed. What a strong feeling this is!"
Then you can say "Okay, I didn't eat my feelings. I didn't stuff them. I didn't try and change history. I sat with this. Now I'm going to ponder the likelihood that this feeling, like all feelings, will have an expiration date. Now I'll skate over it, and go about my day. It's time to distract myself. I might even like to do something extra nice for myself today."
As you can see, feeling feelings to the nth degree isn't the answer, either. Instead, we can choose a sufficient level so that we can remain emotionally balanced and healthy.
And guess what? Only you know, in the moment, in each circumstance, where that sweet spot it.
Yes, it's true. It's that much work. You might not have realized until now how much work it takes for an emotionally healthy person to manage feelings.
But you're not used to it, that's all. It gets easier over time, and turns into background noise. It won't always be so draining.
Try it today. Find some sufficiency. And utter the word "sufficiency" aloud once or twice, so it seeps into your self-talk.
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