Exploring My Emotions Was the Catalyst to Improving My Health.

When it comes to improving our health, we often know what we should do. If we don’t know exactly, we at least have an idea. Exercise more, eat more whole foods, drink less alcohol, get more sleep etc. Nothing groundbreaking. Just effective things than can increase our overall health over time.

So why don’t we do it? I can’t speak for you, but I can speak for myself. I never understood why I couldn’t get my shit together. For years, I rallied the troops every Monday and let the trojan horse of destructive habits invade my behaviour every weekend. It was a cycle. A cycle I was familiar with. One I had grown accustomed to. There was actually a level of comfort in that cycle. The high motivations of a Monday morning when I would say “OK… this week is the week!” coupled with the adrenaline of doing things I wasn’t supposed to all weekend.

I blamed these cycles on everything external and completely ignored the internal. “Oh you know, just a super busy week.” Or “It was one of my buddy’s birthdays, so I had to party all weekend.” Or something as simple as “I’ve been good all week, I’ve earned the right to treat myself this weekend.” Now some of these can be attributed to poor dieting practices, a negligent understanding of behavioural change and the constant habit of setting yourself up for failure. But I want to talk about something different here. I want to address how my emotional issues sabotaged my fitness goals.

I am, for lack of a better term, dog shit at understanding, feeling and analyzing my emotions. I am a stereotypical young man. I’ve been conditioned to ignore my feelings in favour of being a “man” and getting things done. Ironically, I’m also the least skilled handy-man in my house. If something is broken, my partner, Samantha, fixes it. I would honestly be as useful as our dog, Frankie, in any manual labour situation. So I can’t fix your sink like a stereotypical man, but I can ignore my feelings, tell you “I’m fine” and be utterly confused about my deep sense of unhappiness - like a stereotypical man.

I used to blame random things on my seeming inability to control my eating. I blamed sugar, alcohol, processed foods, chemicals (in which I had no understanding of), artificial sweeteners, meat, my blood sugar and essentially entire kitchen sink (that I am unable to fix) as to why I couldn’t stop resorting to food in any time of stress. The truth is, sure some of those things can incline you to eat more, but none are inherently addictive or problematic as a singularity — and if they are, it’s dose dependant. I was simply just struggling to manage my emotions. I felt deeply lonely. I felt neglected. There was no amount of praise, attention and validation that could soothe any of those feelings. Maybe temporarily, but it was always a short-lived feeling. So instead of allowing myself to feel these emotions, I found ways to numb myself.

I had no clue why I was doing this. I was always a happy person - or so I thought. It wasn’t until I took off the rose coloured glasses that I had branded onto my eyes, that I could even touch the whys behind my behaviours. I was coping with food. Which is something I had done since I was a child. Some people lean on alcohol. Some lean on the consumption of things or even other humans. The unicorns lean on loved ones who they feel completely secure to be vulnerable with, and I lean on food. My version of “I need a drink” is “I need a burger”.

Dr. Gabor Maté wrote an interesting book about addiction entitled “In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts”. This is one of the many books that I’ve bought, read two chapters of, and never picked back up. The title was always intriguing to me. What the hell is a hungry ghost? It’s a buddhist term that describes a creature having a scrawny neck, a small mouth, but a large and empty belly. I found myself resonating and identifying with that harrowing creature. There was no amount of food that could fill whatever void I was trying to occupy, but I kept trying. I would take a shot of reality and chase it with a box of pizza to erase any taste of whatever real emotions I had even flirted with. This behavioural cycle was on loop and I was completely ignorant to it.

It wasn’t until I challenged these whys that I could make any realistic change. It wasn’t until I learned to take a step back and feel my actual feelings, that I could reboot my automated response to grab some chips or scroll through Uber Eats. So instead of adding more reps to the habit loop of: feel an uncomfortable emotion, lean on food to cope and reap the rewards of the endorphins associated with ultra processed food; I could maybe just observe my emotions first.

I am not perfect at it now. If I was dog shit before, I at least deserve an “E for effort” these days. So it’s an uphill battle and I still fucking hate emotions. I always tell my partner that she may as well be speaking Italian to me if she’s going to ask me how I feel — because both are languages I don’t speak. I still don’t speak either language today. The best I can do in regards to Italian is yell “Gabagool” at Samantha because she got me into the Sopranos. When it comes to my emotions, I can actually identify more than anger, happiness and frustration now — which is a huge win for me. I can feel some sadness now without having to drown it out. My tolerance is low, but it’s not numbed with a pint of ice cream anymore. It does feel embarrassing to be 26 years old and trying to relearn my ability to feel basic human emotions, but it’s my reality — and it’s shaped a large part of my struggle. It plagued my fitness journey for over a decade without me knowing it, which is exactly why I wanted to write this.

Your fitness goals are not separate from who you are as a human. You bring all of your history into anything you do. If you ignore that, you might find yourself like me — spinning the wheels for years and getting nowhere. Wondering why nothing seems to work and you keep finding yourself back at square one. I could have very well kept searching for the solution to my problems in other fad diets, newer styles of training or anything else localized within the fitness industry. It would have gotten me nowhere. I would just be another person who tried to lose the same 15 lbs for 15 years.

The word holistic gets tossed around recklessly in this industry. Contrary to popular belief, it has nothing to do with apple cider vinegar or Reiki massage. A holistic approach simply means to look as the system as a whole rather than a collection of parts. So instead of approaching my issues around eating as only an issue with eating, I (with the help of a therapist and a wonderful support system) explored my own psychology as well. Turns out my inability to process emotions was leading me to cope with my stress via binge eating. Food was not the issue. Food was just my drug of choice when it came to finding a way to numb myself. The solution was not eliminating any of those comfort foods from my life. That would have only made it worse. The solution was doing the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do — allowing myself to feel my emotions.

-Coach Dylan