One of the best ways to begin to rid yourself of food addictions is to start eating in a more healthy manner. A great way to do that is with raw foods. You may lose weight from all that chewing alone.

When I say raw foods, I’m referring to fruit and vegetables, sprouts, and lots of other great, tasty foods that are, for the most part, still in a natural state.

“Raw” refers to unprocessed, fresh, and highly nutritious food, your body’s favorite kind. Just to be clear, this does not include foods that have been fried, salted to death, overcooked, boiled within an inch of their life, or covered with cream sauces or those acidic sauces that send you running for the pepto-bismal.

Raw food certainly does not mean that you would have to eat raw meat or anything like that. A raw food diet ( a word you won’t see me use very often) means you are eating foods full of energy because they are alive with nutrients.

While food addictions and emotional eating are the long- or short-term result of unresolved emotional trauma, you can still be a food addict and not be obese. You can be a food addict and lose unwanted fat while you are working on resolving those buried feelings.

Hardly anyone eats healthy food in the addictive, ravenous state, although some do. Most people eat “the good stuff” when they are overeating. When emotional eating occurs, the rough emotional experience seems to call for smooth foods like ice cream.

Overeating, food addictions, and emotional eating don’t just occur. We make them occur. The food at fault is what it is. We are the ones we need to work on. Overeating on white cheese rice cakes is no better than stuffing down your feelings with brownies. It just takes more rice cakes.

In any case, the food addict usually does not choose healthy foods. When the body gets food that is fresh and juicy, full of flavor and vitality, and refreshingly energizing, the food addict in you will head for the hills, at least temporarily.

It’s very hard to stuff yourself with raw, healthy, nutritious foods because when you eat those things, your body knows when to stop eating. Food addicts eat like they’re on a mission, and they are.

That mission is self-sabotage, but more on that at another time. For now, the food addiction needs a vacation. When it takes a vacation, you get a vacation. And eating for energy may just be your ticket.

If you want to start getting your life and your body back on track now, click on the link above and check out this program. Or click over there on the right under Natural Rescue Remedies. Take back  your life. Just point and click.

Food addiction usually has some pretty deep roots. Here are five types of emotional trauma that contribute to creating a food addiction:

1. Shame. Shame is usually at the heart of a food addiction. Shame fans the flames of a food addiction like nothing else can. It makes you feel responsible for things you are not or were not responsible for, and that makes you feel helpless and not in control.

2. Parental Disapproval. Children want so much to please their parents. Children love unconditionally until they are taught differently. When children have to constantly guess at how to win their parents’ approval, they lose heart. They internalize the experience and embrace it as a failure on their part.

3. Perfectionism. Even though no one is perfect, there are those who find anything less than perfection unacceptable. If we are perfect, everything will be okay. Life changes. Things don’t stay as they are. Perfect moments change. It’s not your fault. It’s just life being life. You can’t control everything.

4. No Boundaries. Boundaries are like bridges with sides low enough to see over but high enough to keep you from toppling over if you get too close to the edge. Food addicts live on the edge. If you don’t have boundaries, for whatever reason, you will not feel safe. When food addicts do not feel safe, they eat until they do feel safe.

5. Revictimization. When a person has been victimized, there is a deep seated shame that accompanies the experience. Shame cannot be driven out. It has to be released. Repeatedly reliving the scenario, exploring possible different outcomes is futile. The event has passed. It must be faced, named, and let go of.

Food addictions don’t just happen. They are a response to emotional trauma that is still embraced and hidden away.

Food addicts stuff down their feelings with food. Eating is one thing we can control……………..until we can’t.

As long as there are feelings attached to an experience, positive or negative, it will continue to energize the food addiction.

When the experience becomes just an experience with no emotions attached to it, the food addiction associated with it will wither away.

All healing takes place in the present, not in the past and not in the future. We cannot control those moments, but we can be in control each moment as it is happening.

Every moment without judgment is a step toward freedom from your food addiction. Emotional eating may still occur but it need not be a threat to your well-being and sanity.

You don’t owe anyone an explanation as to why you eat or overeat. You will have no need to stuff down tired, old, hopeless feelings once you give them a name. It’s only shame till it has a name.

You can choose what you want to do, including how you want to eat.  Just like with anything else, the more information you have, the more choices you have and the more wisely you can choose.

What’s normal? If there is some pattern that every food addict can follow to get rid of food addictions forever, I’ve yet to see it– in print, anyway.

Everyone is unique. Food addiction is an affliction that plagues many women, and men as well. Since emotional eating or emotional anything is usually associated with women, it stands to reason that female food addicts are spoken of more often than male food addicts.

Because everyone is unique, their nutritional needs and patterns may not fit or even resemble those of others. Keeping the physical body in balance is a daunting task, and an ongoing one.

Our basic needs may be the same from day to day but the intricacies of each individual person’s needs cannot possibly be categorized and labeled as you would a can of peas.

Eating every couple of hours seems to be best for maintaining blood sugar and keeping the body in balance. However, there are obviously many opinions about what and how much a person should eat to attain and maintain one’s ideal weight.

What is one’s ideal weight? Who thought that up and how many people had to believe it for it to become the standard by which all people, especially those who are “over-weight” are measured?

The number of diets and weight-loss programs available today should be an indication of how well that measurement works. Goals have to be measurable if you are to know when you have reached yours.

Food addiction is not something that is impossible to overcome. It does, however, require a personal plan, one that is tailored to you and your body size and type.

Most important of all, you must have a support system in order to succeed in your endeavor to overcome habits like overeating, emotional eating, and food addictions, which sometimes develop over a lifetime.

Don’t ever underestimate the power of friendship in changing your life for the better. People who love and accept you for who you are now will love and respect you as you evolve into an even greater you.

Are you a food addict, or  are you a person with a food addiction? How do you see yourself?

One day you will learn the reason for your emotional eating. You will identify the source of your food addiction, the feelings you are stuffing down by overeating.

Be prepared for that day. When it comes, you won’t need your food addiction anymore. It will fall away because there will be no emotional pain to draw it to you. And you will be free.

Why don’t food addicts just quit cold turkey? Quit what? Food? I don’t think so. But what is this thing with overeating? Why can’t they just stop when they’re full?

Maybe because they don’t always feel full. Maybe they don’t know that they’re full. Maybe because they’re not full.

Not all food addicts are overweight, obese or just fat–choose whichever  label you apply to yourself. Some aren’t fat at all.

Just because you don’t gain weight when you overeat doesn’t mean that you’re any less vulnerable when it comes to food addictions.

One of my slender friends and I were talking about this the other night. When you think of overeating as stuffing yourself, the picture gets clearer.

Stuffing down your emotions like you would stuff an item deep into a bag filled with other things in an effort to hide it only hides it from others, not yourself.

A part of you always knows it’s there, even if you don’t remember what it is you hid or where you hid it. The things we see on the outside are a reflection of what is within us.

For food addicts, the key is to find out what it is you’re really stuffing down when you are in an overeating frenzy. If you hide a cheater food, you won’t even want it. When you remember where it is, you will crave it.

I used to buy a big bag of cheese curls and eat the entire bag, no matter how full I felt or how uncomfortable it made my stomach feel. I didn’t stop until I had eaten every salty crumb. When the bag was empty, I felt satisfied.

One night I stopped by the store on my way back from a late shift at work. The store was out of the brand I wanted. I used to eat whatever was available when I first confronted my food addiction, but over time, I became more discriminating, or particular at least.

There was only a small bag of the item which, after searching the shelves without success for the larger bag I usually purchased and consumed, I finally bought. It was the same brand, only about 1/5 the size.

I plopped myself down in front of some mindless TV show, ate the bag of cheese curls, got up and turned off the TV, brushed and flossed and got ready for bed.

My job was very stressful, as was the two hour drive there and back every day. At that time of night, I just wanted to forget my day and get ready for the next one.

I knew I was a food addict and sometimes I didn’t want to control it. I just didn’t care. It’s always about the blood sugar, the liver. Balance, hormones, metabolism–the liver is involved is all the processes.

What people without food addictions don’t understand is that stress is like spoon-feeding yourself refined sugar and unless you work it off, and fast, it will do you in physically, mentally, and spiritually.

As for the slender overeaters, you can eat junk food, health food, juice, anything that will pass as a nutrient, something to quell your hunger and fill the emptiness. Less is not more for a food addict. You have to eat it all.

That’s what I learned the night I bought the small bag of cheese curls. I went through the same routine I had many other nights. When the bag was emply, I was okay.

It wasn’t about how much I ate. It was about having it all, not stopping until I had every bite. It wasn’t about the size of the package. It was about not having to share it with anyone, having it all to myself.

I started packaging my food in small packages after that. There are some things I won’t keep at the house, like bread. Maybe some bagels once in a while, but if I have a loaf of bread in the house, it will be gone in less than 24 hours.

Sometimes food addicts use overeating as a strategy for getting all the temptation out of the way so they won’t have to deal with it. Lots of luck on that one.

It’s temptation all right but it has nothing to do with food. Food is just the pacifier while you’re waiting to deal with the real cause of your food addiction.

Removing a food addict’s pacifier may keep her or him from using it but it won’t make the wound go away. Healing the emotional trauma will heal the food addiction.

Find out what the real thing is. Why are you overeating? Eating over and over again the same thing until it’s gone. What is happening over and over again that you are stuffing down with food? What are you trying to replace with food?

A therapist might be able to help you find out. Overeating can be dangerous. Food addiction can be dangerous. But hidden trauma that is a trigger for the food addict can be the most dangerous of all.

Everyone should have something that they don’t have to share with anyone, something special, even if it is only a feeling. Even if it’s only a 3.5 ounce bag of cheese curls.