A popular spiritual teacher, Mami Onami, recently wrote an article about how she identified, and has subsequently stopped; “emotional eating.” She also posted on instagram about how all spiritual practices praise “fasting.” And how using food ‘as relief’ makes you fat.

I have been enjoying following this woman because I love women who are not afraid to look unhinged or crazy. I love an expressed woman. I love when people just say what they think. I find such a relief in knowing I can trust someone to just say the thing. Most women I know could use a lot more raw, full expression.

That being said, I am an expressed woman myself. I have some strong thoughts and opinions on this concept of ‘emotional eating,’ and the spiritual connection to food, so I will also go ahead and share my unhinged beliefs here.

Most Health Aware Women are Under Eating

The truth is: most health-aware women are under eating. I see it again and again in my practice. Women come in to work with me. I have them track their food for 3 days. The majority are eating well under 2000 calories. Most women are under the impression they need to eat less or at least ‘control’ the types of food they’re eating a lot more.

The rhetoric that people are overeating is everywhere. The collective idea of good health is that you are pure, worthy, and immaculately disciplined if you can survive off salad and green juice. This is not true.

Our bodies need fuel to LIVE. Our bodies need calories, balanced macronutrients, and plenty of micronutrients to produce energy, rebuild our tissues, operate our immune system, sleep (yes! You need energy to sleep well!), think, and detoxify our bodies.

Eating less food does not make you better or more worthy. Eating only vegetables does not make you more pure. Denying your body’s needs is not a badge of honor. It’s the exact road that leads to the destination of depletion, burnout, and massive dysregulation. We under eat, try to willpower our way to greater purity (eg skinniness) and then wonder why we start getting mysterious symptoms in our 30s, have no energy, and constantly feel overwhelmed by the demands of regular life.

I talk about the importance of eating enough constantly on my instagram, on this recent podcast with Olivia Lara Owen, and in the Grounded Nutrition class I just taught (you can get the replay for free here).

The Truth About Cravings

So many intense cravings come from micronutrient deficiencies, eating too little calories overall, or eating inconsistently (which can easily cause minor to major binging and restriction cycles). Yes, there may be an emotional component to these cravings, but I implore you to work with your nourishment on a deeper level before assuming you just need more ‘willpower’ or your desire to eat is somehow not rooted in your physical needs.

If you do struggle with binging or ‘emotional eating’, how has relying on willpower worked for you so far? Most people who do struggle with emotional eating have tried a million ways to use willpower to stop it. I am so familiar with this myself. I know the attempted tight gripped force to the falling-off-the-wagon-shame-and-punishment wash and repeat cycle so well. It was my story for years.

Some more useful and pertinent inquiries to ask yourself are:

* Have you actually focused on getting 100% of your micronutrients from your food?

* Do you eat defined, hearty, macronutrient balanced meals at regular, consistent intervals?

* Are you sure you eat enough for the energy demands of your unique life?

* Are you eating enough carbohydrates to fuel ovulation, thyroid function, and brain activity? (This minimum is around 180g of carbs per day for women, which is 2 medium sweet potatoes + 1 cup orange juice + 1 cup blueberries + 2 cups rice or MORE over the course of a day).

If you aren’t answering yes to these questions, then I would definitely focus on these before I would worry about trying to eat less or control your ‘emotional eating’.

Emotional eating does exist. I’m not saying it doesn’t. But what most people think is emotional eating is just the body trying to meet its needs. The body never lies. If the body is asking for something there is a reason for it. That reason may be emotional, but it could very well be physical. This is where people assume it’s emotional and don’t consider what it actually takes to fuel a body well. When your body is fueled really well consistently, cravings are drastically minimized.

I, personally, rarely have cravings for anything. I get hungry. I eat a lot of food. That’s it. I, of course, have preferences. I like certain foods, but mostly I am totally happy just eating a lot of really good quality, solid, even, boring food.

What if You’re Simply Not Hungry?

So what if binging isn’t your issue? What if you know or you suspect already you don’t eat enough? What if you’re just not hungry?

In the article, Onami, says her realization about emotional hunger versus physical hunger came after she got a two day stomach bug and lost weight because she wasn’t eating.

Not eating increases stress hormones. When we are sick our body may need to reroute some energy or clear the stomach to do the work it needs to do to rid itself of the bug, but this will raise stress hormones. The best thing we can do when we’re sick is hydrate and try to nourish ourselves as best we can.

When stress hormones rise hunger decreases. Stress hormones also reduce our perception of pain. Stress hormones make us a lot less sensitive to our body’s needs overall. This is actually their evolved function.

Stress hormones can function a lot like an upper. We feel ready to take on the world! We can actually feel really good in a manic sort of way. Especially when we figure out a way to get an even higher dose of stress hormones (like eating a lot less than we’re used to).

Stress hormones are an awesome evolutionary adaption to needing energy when there wasn’t food available. So that we can go find food. This adaption wasn’t meant to be a place we live in permanently, but this is where we may find ourselves when we chronically under eat.

If you tend to just ‘not be a big eater,’ or have trouble feeling hungry, especially when you haven’t eaten for long periods of time (like in the morning, for example), this is an indication your stress hormones are probably high.

If our stress hormones are high, we actually can’t really trust our hunger cues. We should never ‘force’ ourselves to eat food, however, we do need to stop the stress hormone cycle and remember to fuel our bodies.

What Onami’s whole article sounds like to me is someone who is just revved up on stress hormones.

Running on stress hormones is expensive. It is like taking a loan out of the bank. Eventually, you will have to pay that money (energy) back.

People are different, have different stories, backgrounds and constitutions. Some people can withstand a ton of ‘running on stress hormones,’ others are more delicate and sensitive and will feel the effects much sooner.

For everyone, there will be a reckoning at some point. It could be the vegetarian, super health conscious, marathon runner who drops dead at 55 because of a heart attack and everyone is so confused because “they were so healthy!”.

It could be the midlife health crash and insomnia after a lifetime of pushing beyond our body’s limits. It could be fertility challenges. It could be crippling depression or anxiety. It could be lots of little things: digestive distress, thyroid issues, injuries, low energy levels; death by a thousand paper cuts.

These seemingly unexplainable or non-sensical health issues can actually be very well be explained by living in a low energy availability (LEA) state and physiological high levels of stress, for years and years of our lives, thinking we are doing the ‘right health thing’ by eating as little as we can.

In this lifetime, the body will always win.

The Elephant in the Room…

The elephant in the room is: eating as little as we can goes along with endeavoring to be as skinny as possible. Why are so many people under eating? Well, because they don’t want to gain weight, of course!

I also don’t want you to gain fat, but I do want you to stop prioritizing the slimness of your body over your own nourishment. Eating enough to fuel your energetic needs should not make you gain weight. In fact, eating enough to fuel our energetic needs is when we get to really heal and build our resilience. There are plenty of ways to nourish yourself well and fully without packing on a ton of excess fat.

Fat is protection. If you do gain a lot of fat just by eating enough calories for a grown woman then this is a sign your metabolic function is low and you may need to go through a slow, methodical, reverse dieting process to rebuild your metabolic health. This would involve increasing your food intake very incrementally over a long period of time (could be years).

Your body will be happiest at a weight that makes you feel nourished, safe, grounded, and full. When you focus on nourishment, you will have the body your Soul belongs to. Not some skinny replica of someone else’s body, while feeling miserable.

Spirituality and Food

This brings me to Onami’s assertion that all spirituality praises and encourages fasting. It is true there are lot of spiritual practices that involve fasting. But fasting intentionally for a spiritual purpose is very different than just trying to eat as little as possible all time.

If a woman wants to fast as a spiritual practice then let her go to a cabin away from all her daily duties, work, children, and home so she can really experience the spiritual aspect of it. Asking a woman to fast while she is working, caring for children, working out, and holding a home, is not what the spiritual sages had in mind. It’s beyond our body’s capacity.

Most of the extreme fasting-as-purification ideas are just more ‘masculine-ascension-based-spirituality’ and puritanical dogma disguised as spiritual wisdom. We have taken so much out of context and forced it through a patriarchal lens that removes the muck of the matter (on all accounts).

Fasting was done, but for short periods of time, not indefinitely. The needs of the body are looked down upon as nasty, dirty, and animal-like. There is this idea we need to separate from our body’s needs because they are somehow below us. This is the exact seed of the demonization of feminine.

Matter comes from the Latin word ‘mater,’ meaning mother. The goddess cults that existed before patriarchal religion worshiped grains, honey, and milk. If fasting is part of spirituality, feasting is just as much a part of spiritual celebration.

The body, the Earth and the Mother were worshipped as the source of all. Sex and food were honored, revered and held as sacred. This is the kind of spirituality that has been demoted for thousands of years and I, for one, am ready for it to make its comeback. I am not interested in anymore tight-gripped, white-knuckled sanitized, puritanical spirituality.

I am more interested in the spirituality that makes my very body sacred. I am interested in how Spirit wraps and penetrates into every cell of my being. I am interested in the descension process that brings me deeper into matter, Mother, and this numinous human experience. I am interested in living embodied.

I am indeed a spiritual being having a human experience, I believe that wholeheartedly. And with that, I believe my body is housed within my Soul and part of it.

I believe its needs are holy. I believe eating is a practice of communion with the forces that created me. I believe me caring for my body with enough food, loving touch, connected sex, and attentive guardianship is my prayer and part of the legacy I leave behind. I believe this kind of spirituality is what women need to be encouraged to remember, not encouraged to figure out how to bypass their hunger cues so they can be a skinny b***h.

If you’re interested in true nourishment and how to center and orient toward it, join us in Deep Nourishment. We have officially started already, but the past call replays are up and it’s designed to be self paced.

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