Here is something that took me a long time to grasp, but the understanding has been extremely liberating, "emotional" eating IS normal, happy eating. You don't need to kill it with fire. It's no big deal. Maybe you'll be a little less hungry later. That's about it. Things don't get weird unless you forbid it or shame yourself for it. Then it becomes big and reactive. The idea that you need to eat perfectly or else you're "bad" and will gain weight is total diet nonsense. The fear is irrational. Your body is so much smarter than that. It will naturally adjust appetite and energy if we let it. That "uh-oh, I've blown it" sentiment is far more problematic than eating some crackers when you're stressed, or cookies when you're bored, and then just getting on with it. Another thing I've realized is that if I’ve been consistently well-fed for weeks and months, eating doesn't often occur to me as a thing to do when I'm bored, happy, or anxious. Restrict, or ignore hunger, and it zooms to the top of the list of coping mechanisms. I like this post from Caroline Dooner: https://thefuckitdiet.com/in-defense-of-emotional-eating/ She argues that eating is an inherently emotional activity, and that trying to make it one hundred percent logical and robotic is what causes food issues in the first place.
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Exactly, trust is everything, and it's created through repeated action. Doing the new behaviors, facing the scary thoughts, and seeing that everything is still ok. You can't decide in your mind, "ok, I trust now, problem solved." Or, "I'm not going to take action until I trust." That means never taking the steps necessary to experience the positive mental shift. Each time you try something new and learn from it, your confidence grows. Then you trust. Then it's real and not hypothetical.
It's not, "If I don't trust, I can't do this." Nooooobody who has restricted for years trusts that not dieting is going to be ok. You've kept yourself in chains all this time by actively telling yourself the opposite. "If I eat this, terrible things will happen. If I don't do that, terrible things will happen." It's fear and negativity all day long. Even when we're doing restriction "right" there's always the fear that it can't last, and the horrible story about what will happen as a result.
See the problem there? So, when you eat what you actually want for dinner, and don't restrict the next morning, diet brain goes INSANE, but that's what you've programed it to do. Now, we're going to teach it a new way of being. The more you do the new behaviors that you want and react with kindness and curiosity instead of guilt and fear, the more your brain is going to dial down the panic alarm and begin to turn up the trust.