Recently, I've had quite a few clients coming to see me with food related issues, which got me thinking about my own (continuing) journey with food.
Looking back on my childhood, it is now completely clear to me how (unintentionally of course) my family conditioning set up strong connections between food and emotional eating. I remember really clearly being given "nice" (i.e. sweet or heavy) food as a reward: at Christmas and birthdays of course, but also to help me finish my homework, or to help me to relax in the evenings after I had finished my work.
In the last few years, I have become clearer about these patterns, in myself, my friends and in many of the clients who come to see me.
My training at the School of Energy Healing was a lot about self-healing. As part of each week, we would work through issues related to the particular healing technique we were studying: for example childhood issues, issues with relationships or even patterns that may have developed in past lives.
And we were always told: don't eat heavy or sweet food before a healing. By doing this we would keep the emotions related to the issue "stuffed down." And slowly, through my own experience at the School, I became aware of the truth of this. If I were in touch with a difficult emotion through the work we were doing, I would be really strongly drawn to eating more. In my day-to-day life now I also try to stop if I have a sudden craving for a particular type of food, just to see what emotions I am feeling, and, if they are unpleasant, whether I can just fully feel them without resorting to food.
It also became clearer to me why, during the time I had chronic fatigue, it had been almost impossible for me to give up wheat and sugar in my diet. For, as I cut them out, the emotions that I had originally kept down with the wheat and sugar would come to the surface. I had no tools for dealing with them at the time, so would often revert to eating more heavily to stop feeling those unpleasant emotions.
Through Energy Healing and Emotional Freedom Technique, I began to heal the layers of emotional hurt and trauma; in time, it made it much easier to improve my diet - to the extent that I am now eating pretty much 100% raw food, and feeling very fit and healthy on it.
Fiona Cutts is an energy healer who specialises in working with clients suffering from ME. You can see more about her work with people struggling with this debilitating condition at http://www.treatmentforme.net/. She has herself recovered from ME using a combination of energy healing, the Emotional Freedom Technique, nutrition, graduated exercise, meditation, chi kung and dance. She is an Integrated Energy Healing, in the tradition of Barbara Brennan, an Advanced Emotional Freedom Technique Practitioner and a reiki practitioner. You can read more about her and the way she works with people suffering from ME at http://www.treatmentforme.net/#/my-story.