Q&A 32 – Overeating: The loving nature of cravings

Traditionally we look at food cravings and the drive to overeat as a problem, something to be fixed and overcome. What if we’ve misunderstood the message cravings are trying to send us? And what if they’re actually trying to help us?

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. 

Show Notes

* What our cravings are really pointing toward

* How we can begin to recognize the wisdom in cravings

* What happens as we see what food cravings have on offer for us

Transcript of this episode

Hello explorers and welcome to Q&A; episode 32 of Unbroken. I’m Alexandra Amor. 

Today our question has to do with the nature of symptoms and what they mean for us. 

By symptoms, in this case, specifically, I want to talk about the drive to overeat or cravings for food. I just finished a recording a podcast with Rachel Singleton, which will be available on October 19, 2023. And as so often happens, when I have a guest that I’m talking to, I have insights throughout while I’m speaking to that person and see things slightly differently, from a slightly different angle. Or perhaps we could say a little deeper than I had seen them before. 

Rachel is someone who struggled with physical symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome for years, and did a lot to try to resolve that and fix what she felt was wrong with her body. And in that interview, she talks about how she began to see things in a completely different way and that was ended up that ended up being what resolved her health issues. 

As we were speaking, and we were talking about the loving nature of symptoms, and in this specific example, I’m going to talk about the loving nature of cravings.

This metaphor occurred to me, so I want to highlight it, and then talk about what it’s pointing toward. 

If you were cooking in your kitchen, and things started to go a little awry, you might notice a bit of a smell coming. Let’s say you spilled something onto the burner that you were using in the kitchen. And that would be the first, very minor signal that something was going awry with your cooking. And then if you didn’t take care of that whatever was happening, if you didn’t notice it, innocently, the burner might start to smoke. And then after a while that smoke might cause you to cough. But you still might be, let’s say distracted or just not paying attention. 

Then what might happen, if there’s enough smoke created, the smoke alarm in your home or your apartment would start to go off. In my apartment, it’s kind of a beeping noise. That just alerts me that there’s smoke in the house. And then, metaphorically speaking, if we didn’t pay attention to that, flames might start to erupt, based on whatever’s going on on the stove and with your cooking. 

As that situation grows worse than maybe the larger alarm in your, I live in a condo building, so there, there are those little red boxes that you can pull, or like a little red handle. And so someone might pull one of those. And then it’s a much more alarming sound. Pun intended. And we’ve all heard that when we’ve been in… I’m hearkening back to a school, or an office building; it’s really loud, really loud bell kind of sounds.