What happens when your intuition and your appetite and your emotions are learning to sit in the same room?
Revisiting intuitive eating and the slow steady process of learning how to feed my body
If you are new to DARE TO BE, HELLO! I am so happy you are here. The last Friday of every month is a FEELING IT FRIDAY where the DARE TO BE community is invited to let them out - all the feelings. They are welcome here, you are welcome, just as you are. You can read more about what that means here.
All month, we’ve been exploring embodiment. How to land in our bodies, trust our bodies, return there and find grounding. For me, it’s a process. It may be a lifelong lesson of forgetting, remembering and returning. And that is ok.
This week, I honored my body by not forcing it to crank out words here that felt forced. I was following threads of an essay in my mind in the midst of a very busy week in my life, personally and professionally, and ultimately decided to give myself a pass. So, instead I chose an earlier essay to share today. One I wrote in the summer of 2024. One that is totally aligned with our October theme of embodiment. One that feels VERY necessary for me to revisit on Halloween. Because, for me, sugar is the ghost of Allison past. The one who sneaks right back in and still rattles her cages.
Except, lately, I hear the rattle sooner. And when I fall back into old patterns of not tuning in to my body before I feed my body food, I move on. I don’t sweat it out in the shame sauna. I step into the next day and simply make better choices.
Sometimes it takes looking back to move forward. Sometimes the stories you tell yourself you are living aren’t accurate. Sometimes you’re identifying with an older version of yourself and don’t even know you are stretching out into a newer version of you. Change happens at a snail’s pace sometimes. Especially when it’s you seeing you.
Before you read any further, I feel it is necessary to put a trigger warning here at the top. The essay I share below gets into some disordered eating habits. If reading or thinking about this sort of thing is difficult to hold, please take care of yourself and join me next week instead. No need to dive in here. xoxoxo
I’ve had a version of this essay in my drafts for a little bit. My initial intention was to share this only with my paid subscribers. The more I returned to it, the more I felt I needn’t stay small about this struggle I am having. While it feels big and scary and vulnerable to share all of this with more people, I also know that sharing shaky things leads to growth.
I’m going to get real about something. Sugar. It has me.
I keep sprinkling sugar all over my problems and fears. Sweetening them so I don’t do anything about them. Eating my feelings instead of addressing them.
I find myself almost trance like - filling my mouth with treats instead of spilling out the words that will move the needle. The needle that remains stuck on repeat. I throw food at my problems which only makes my feelings harder to metabolize.
This feels familiar. I’m eating the same way I used to drink. Quickly. Secretively. Habitually. To cope. Mindlessly.
That last part is why I keep going back. Because sitting still with my mind is too much.
I woke up Thursday morning at 2:10 AM and felt the same kind of heavy regret sitting on my chest that I used to feel in my drinking days. Laying corpse like, I was beating myself up internally for climbing into bed after binging on cookies and chips the evening before. I had shut the bedroom door, my silent signal to my family: I need to be alone. There is just too much togetherness in the summer. There, I said it. The needing to peel myself away from the ones I love the most brings a level of guilt I can’t quite get out from under.
“Mom, are you mad?”
“No, sweetie. I just need to be by myself for a bit.”
Except I’m not alone. And I am mad. Mad at my lack of control. I’m surrounded by calories and polluting sugar that will certainly disrupt my sleep and make me feel like a bag of shit in the morning. Just like drinking did.
Some days I just feel like an open wound. My feelings are super-sized, and I don’t know how to right size the emotions or distill them in a way that feels natural to speak. So, I use food as a bandage to cover the wounds.
I am flailing around lately in my sobriety. When this happens, I tend to look back at spots in my journey, times when I felt sturdier and healthier. I’m not talking about the elusive, sought after pink cloud. I am talking more about being in a flow of contentment. Not every hour or every day, but a consistent flow of contentment. I had it. And somehow slipped out of it. I can’t get that stride back and I keep over analyzing why that might be.
Walking and journaling help. Movement and words on a page mirror something back to me. And just this week I stepped right into what I think it might be. For me to feel consistent contentment, I need to feel in control.
Shortly after giving up alcohol, I dug my claws into intermittent fasting. Looking back, I think I needed this as a distraction. Somewhere to tunnel my vision so that I wasn’t thinking nonstop about how good a drink would feel.
As the pounds dropped and as my pants felt looser, my days felt tightly contained. I was so hyper focused on when I would open my eating window and when I would close it each evening. All the brain space that occupied my chokehold over moderating my alcohol consumption was just neatly shuffled over to the obsessive restrictions and rule setting that is required with fasting. My addictive mind was given no space to unhinge. It latched right onto the next compulsive habit. I jumped from one ship to the other, avoiding the mud of my emotions because I was hyper focused on this new fixation.
I am turning to books and podcasts for guidance on why sugar and food is taking me hostage. When my drinking habit was tapping me on the shoulder constantly, I did this same thing. I inhaled all the quit lit and podcasts, thinking I could get sober by osmosis. I know better. I know that’s not how change happens.
So why am I not doing better?
In the last year, I’ve bought but not finished the following books: The Hunger Habit by Judson Brewer, Feeding the Hungry Heart by Geneen Roth, The Fast Metabolism Diet by Haylie Pomroy, When Hungry, Eat by Joanne Fedler, Whole 30’s Food Freedom Forever by Melissa Urban, Hunger by Roxanne Gay, Breaking Up with Sugar by Molly Carmel, Life in the Fasting Lane by Eve Mayer and Megan Ramos, Clean(ish) by Gin Stephens, Fast, Feast Repeat by Gin Stephens, Brave Girl Eating by Harriet Brown and Regaining Yourself by Ira Sacker. I am not kidding when I say I have not finished ONE of these books. I buy them out of some kind of desperation and then get too uncomfortable to finish. So, I abort the mission.
I stream and follow regularly the following podcasts: Fast, Feast, Repeat, Insatiable, Strong Mind, Strong Body, willfully hoping the words will be persuasive enough to nourish my caloric intake of “enoughness.”
My antenna has been up enough to decipher that intuitive eating is where it’s at. That is what is being talked about in all the “healthy” circles. But what if your intuition and your appetite and your emotions can’t sit in the same room? What happens when one gobbles the other and never spits it back up?
I revisited a podcast episode this week that has helped me unpeel some of this murkiness.
Where I am landing the plane is here: it is about recalibrating (backing the truck up to a snail pace sometimes) to get to know the signals your body is giving you. How to recognize when you are experiencing actual hunger.
On the podcast above, Dr. Judson Brewer explains that our clues and potential answers lie in the investigation of the craving. Why am I eating this right now? How is each bite making me feel? How about when I am done, did it “do the job?”.
For me, every time, I feel worse after binging. Dr. Brewer says to pay close attention to the foods that cause that discontentment. That will, with time and attention, change the reward value you are placing on that food. There are subtle differences between feeling satisfied after a meal and feeling contentment (there IS a difference). It’s about using contentment as a meter. As a measuring tool. Not the caloric content. Not the nutrition label. Your body will give you more accurate information as to whether that food is good for you.
I think the special sauce in all of this is to slow things down and get curious. So that we can hear and feel the innate reward and hunger system wake us up. So that our taste buds spark us awake. Instead of numb something else we don’t want to look at.
Other recommendations: share the meal with yourself. Not your phone or tv. (ouch)
When you don’t overindulge and crave the next bite, that is a sign that what you were eating actually brings you contentment (I had this ALL backwards!) When you are craving another bite, another bowl, another fist full, it’s the chemical makeup of the food you are putting in your body that is hijacking your mind. It zaps you into thinking I need more. I can’t get enough. Sound familiar? Yep. Alcohol works the same way. At least with me it did.
Most food is engineered similarly to alcohol. The longer I dated alcohol, with each sip, I needed more to get the satisfaction I was chasing. As I was listening to this episode, I realized it’s the same battle I am in now. Just with a different enemy. Dammit, I want to take my power back. I took control of the power alcohol had over me. I can do this, too. I want to break out of the food jail.
What I am walking away with is this: it is about awareness of gratification and not willpower. Self-indulgence is not self-care.
I will keep repeating this to myself as I continue to buy the books and stream the podcasts so that I can hear about all the ways I don’t intuitively eat. I might have to just fall into my emotions to figure out why the hell I am polishing off a sleeve of Oreos.
The books tell me what questions to ask: am I eating this right now because I am emotionally charged?
Am I chewing on this, grinding it down with my teeth, while swallowing all the words I know I need to speak? Would I reach for this food if I actually bit into a conversation? One I know I need to bring to the table and serve up.
If I wasn’t spinning so many plates in the air, if I actually put some things down, would I not polish my plate? Would my body signal to me to put the fork down while my mind tells me to put the sword down? Is there really such a thing as truce with food?
Asking for a friend……..
ICYMI:
The first four essays in the October embodiment theme:
~Who am I in this body? Becoming my own midwife, deliver me to thy body
~Looking Outside Myself to Find Myself and staying tender with how to Tend(to)Her
~Semantics or Somatics? Building our own body of work
MORE RESOURCES: If intuitive eating is something you seek, I highly recommend subscribing to
and her publication . Kristi’s latest essay (also a redux) is a great companion if you overindulge with candy this week (or any week). Halloween, sugar, and a little perspective How to deal when you occasionally overindulge—without guilt, punishment, or a shame spiral.If feeding your hunger for a more beautiful, more nourishing life is what you seek, go visit
and her publication . In particular, these three essays feel like signposts for me -And I can’t leave without dropping this nugget of a feel good here:
UP NEXT:
Next month’s theme will be on TIME - the ways we chase it, cling to it, and lose ourselves in it, especially as we age. And STAY TUNED - I will be posting details about a mid-month SUBSTACK LIVE with
CROWDSOURCING:
~If you’re comfortable sharing, has your relationship with food changed over the years? Do you feel like you feed yourself the food you intuitively need? Do your emotions and meals get grinded together into one recipe sometimes?
~What kinds of themes would feel restorative to you for the New Year (yes, 2026 is just around the bend, folks)
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Thank you so much for the mention, Allison. So much resonance with what you share here - for me, shifting my eating patterns and relationship with food came before quitting alcohol, and I actually found it harder.
I am able to eat intuitively these days, but I was only able to arrive at that place after years of eating a whole-food diet (which I still eat and deeply enjoy) combined with daily yoga and meditation practice (which help me touch into what my body actually wants and needs... as well as the impact of anything I consume - food or otherwise). Currently, I genuinely don’t crave foods that leave me feeling worse after eating them, but that still surprises me - my past self would’ve never believed it was possible, but turns out it is!
Sending care from my heart to yours as you walk your own path with it all ❤️
Thank you, Allison, for revisiting this topic. Getting back to mindful eating is definitely a goal of mine. However, I'm giving myself permission to wait until after retirement, so the new year will be a perfect time to start (again). All the prep of retirement (looking at healthcare plans, informing my students & parents, making sure lesson plans are ready for my replacement, etc) paired with emotions all over the place is about all I can handle right now. Thank you for sharing the pics of Zoey. What a love bug! I totally know what you mean when you say, "the day she rescued us." I've experienced that rescuing as well:) I'm looking forward to your next theme, time, and I'll think about possible themes for 2026. As always, thank you for sharing.