We shouldn’t avoid emotional eating because when we turn emotional eating into something to avoid as much as dieting, we fall in the trap of diet mentality and all its negative side effects such as overeating and binging. Isabel Foxen Duke is a brilliant leader in the Health At Every Size movement and this interview will rock your world! Must listen! The Reason Why We Overeat and Binge Perfectionistic expectation will absolutely lead to rebellion. When applied to food, it will lead to binging and overeating in the same way that perfectionistic expectation to work will lead to burnout. We cannot uphold those expectations. It's impossible to keep it up all the time, so we end up crashing. We crash in proportion to how rigid we were trying to hold on. And it's important to understand this concept if we really want to understand the reason why we overeat and binge.  The more you attempt dieting, the less you are likely to stick to one.  Historically, we’ve always been emotional eaters. When we look at the evolution of the human being, we’ve eaten emotionally, socially, so we cannot cut it off. So, when we try to cease emotional eating from existing, we end up being on the wagon, off the wagon, on the wagon a.k.a. yo-yo dieting. The problem with most people is that they haven’t addressed the diet mentality that's why they fail to understand the reason why we overeat and binge.  Looking from the Inside Diet mentality goes more than just a relationship with food. It’s the way we approach life in general. We often look at our happiness through a solution that is external to us instead of looking at finding happiness, joy, and fulfillment from inside. In the same way we relate to diet, we think that controlling our external environment a.k.a. our food will lead us to happiness instead of looking from the inside. If you think that you are going to find happiness by eating a certain way, not only you aren’t going to find it there, but you are probably going to fail at it, to begin with. What’s interesting is that, when we put perfection to our food, chances are we also apply perfection in many other aspects of our lives because we lack trust in ourselves. What does your body want you to eat? That only solves half the problem. The other half of the problem is how we think. It’s how we talk to ourselves. Are we living in diet mentality? Are we approaching food like is a thing that we should be careful around? Body Image Issues I’m overweight, but I’m healthier than 90% of the people out there. The reason is because it has nothing to do with weight. Weight is not a causal effect of health, just a by-product. This desire for weight loss beyond health is what we call the body image issue. Ninety-nine percent of food issue boils down to body image issues. Majority of disordered eating behaviors start with “I don’t think my body is enough and I feel like I should try and change it by restricting my food.” If you never had the thought, “I wish I was thinner,” you would never have gone on a diet, you would never deal with this binge eating, emotional eating problems. Emotional eating is heavily correlated with dieting. The more you diet, the more you restrict, the more you’re going to turn to food for comfort and that clearly gives us a better perspective on the reason why we overeat and binge.  Health at Every Size “It’s a lot easier to stop obsessing about food when we feel good about ourselves.” There is a whole movement that is trying to demonstrate that beautiful people come in different shapes and sizes. There’s a ton of evidence that if you are exposing yourself to body diversity visually on a regular basis, it will actually start to change your brain. It will change the way it looks at bodies including your body, thereby, transforming how you tackle body image. Last week's episode, I talked about the 6 powerful benefits of gratitude and how it can change everything. Yes!... including food obsession. I suggest you check it out! You can lis