Tag: emotional needs

Food for Thought: Our Needs Bear Equal Weight

~ Julie de Rohan, eatonomy® ~ 14 Comments

“The wants, needs, feelings, hours, hopes, and dreams of everyone around you bear equal weight to those of your own. Neither mine nor yours are greater. Ingrain that into your understanding”. ― Richelle E. Goodrich

How easy or difficult is it to “ingrain that into your understanding”?

For some it’ll be easy, it’ll already be part of your world view. “Of course my needs are as important as anyone else’s. Why wouldn’t they be?”, you think.

Some behave as though their needs are more important than anyone else’s.

For others, it’ll be tough to believe your wants, needs, feelings, time and aspirations are in any way important, let alone just as important as anyone else’s.

Intellectually, you might know that it must be true.

But you just don’t feel it.

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Gentle Reminder: Something about Feelings

~ Julie de Rohan, eatonomy® ~ 30 Comments

This is the blog post where I wrap up the theme for the month – in this case hope and hopelessness – and link to an older post from the archives.

There’s just one problem.

It’s the first day of my holiday and I’m currently sitting in the kitchen of a very nice little cottage in the Cotswolds. The surrounding countryside is beautiful. The weather is perfect. The only sounds I can hear are the gentle hum of the fridge, birds chirping in the courtyard outside and the tap-tap-tap of my fingers hitting the keyboard.

Why is this a problem? Well, I’ve come down with a severe case of lazyitis (must be the change of water, I think) and I’m struggling to write the post I was planning to write which, I recall, was something about feelings.

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Gentle Reminder: The Discomfort of Comfort

~ Julie de Rohan, eatonomy® ~ 18 Comments

You reach for food to soothe yourself, to comfort yourself, to make everything better just for a moment.

But what happens when that moment is over?

The discomfort kicks in.

You feel over-full. You feel sick. You hate yourself.

What was intended to be comforting has to turned into physical and emotional discomfort.

Why have I done this to myself yet again, you ask. Why?

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Expert Insight: The Self-Care Gender Gap

~ Julie de Rohan, eatonomy® ~ 26 Comments

“One gender-related theme that stood out was related to caretaking. Every woman in the study, but none of the men, reported putting others before themselves…

Tina was a compulsive eater who used food as a way to practise self-care. During the second interview, she began to realise how taking care of others led her to eat: “I had no down time. I had no time for myself and I think I was using food more than I had been to take the edge off and medicate myself, reward myself, treat myself”.

– Patricia Goodspeed Grant, “Social and Emotional Origins of Comfort Eating”

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How Do You Prove to Yourself You Care?

~ Julie de Rohan, eatonomy® ~ 26 Comments

Self-care – that old chestnut. Right now, it feels like we can’t move for people telling us we should care about ourselves.

It’s great in theory, but what about in practice?

Many of us yearn for healthy self-esteem. We think “if I lose weight that will make me feel better about myself” but, while it might make us feel better physically, it doesn’t increase how much we care about ourselves.

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Food for Thought: Knowing Yourself

A tall yellow sunflower in the foreground on a sunny day, with a field of sunflowers behind it.
~ Julie de Rohan, eatonomy® ~ 38 Comments

“You’ve got to know yourself so you can at last be yourself” – D.H. Lawrence

We know when we meet someone who’s at ease with themselves. They know who they are and they’re comfortable in their own skin. There’s no need for them to impress, play games or apologise for themselves.

If all we’ve ever experienced is disharmony within, we might envy them. “I wish I were like that”, we think. “Life must be so uncomplicated for them”.

The irony is that in order to be ourselves we often believe we need to be someone else entirely – someone better. Or, at the very least, we must “fix” what we believe is “wrong” about us.

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