Old-paradigm psychology can try to convince us that unwanted habits are caused by a need to feel loved or safe or cared for. It can feel like we’re using food, or other substances, to soothe or comfort ourselves. In this podcast episode we bust this myth and look toward the true origin of unwanted habits.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.

Are you interested in connecting with others who are exploring this understanding? Would you like some coaching and ongoing support with an eye toward resolving an unwanted habit? Click the image below to learn about the Unbroken Community and join the waitlist.

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Show Notes

• The five reasons an unwanted habit has nothing to do with replacing love





• Does it matter where our painful thoughts about food originate?





• On the fluidity of thought and how it can change, morph and disappear





• How the feeling connected to a thought is going to tell us if it’s the truth or a lie





• How it’s not on us to change, manage or control our thoughts





• How we are not in control of the timeline of when things change

Transcript of episode

Hello Explorers and welcome to episode 62 of Unbroken. I’m Alexandra Amor. I’m here today to talk about the really common myth that when we have an unwanted habit where we’re using that habit to replace love that we might feel that we are missing. 

So in other words, as it said on the title card for this episode, is food really love? Or is that a myth? I’m going to tell you why I think it’s a myth.

Before I say that, I should say that I think it makes sense that we came to that conclusion. And I know for me, I spent years and years trying to love myself in a way that would cause my unwanted overeating habit to disappear. And none of what I tried worked. I tried things like journaling, affirmations, radical self-compassion. What else was in that arena of loving ourselves? Cognitive behavioral therapy. I took a course I’ve talked about this before. And it was all about creating a loving feeling within ourselves. In order that our overeating habit would drop away. And none of that worked. 

I’m going to talk about that today and about what I see now, when we have the thought that we’re using a substance like food to try to replace love within ourselves.

Before we get into that, I want to quickly have a reminder here, that if you haven’t done so already, you can sign up for the waitlist for the Unbroken community.

The address for that is AlexandraAmor.com/community. And there’s lots of information there on that page. 

The community will be launching later this year in 2024. And we will be having some live coaching in the community, we’ll have an online group, we’ll have a couple calls a month live with me. And as I say, all the details are there on that page, AlexandraAmor.com/community. 

Okay, so let’s get into this subject of whether or not food is love.

Are we are using something like food and overeating to replace love that we believe is missing within us?

The reason I’m talking about this today is that I had another coaching session with Tania Elfersy recently, and you may have listened to the episode, number 53, where Tania coached me. And so we’ve gotten together another couple of times since then. 

Today, we had a conversation about this thought and feeling that I have when I’m putting food on my plate, specifically at supper time. And the thought that I have is, there’s not enough. We talked about that, and what that meant, what that thought means for me. It felt as I explained to Tania, it felt like it was saying to me that I wasn’t loved enough, that that feeling of there’s never enough I’m sort of transferring it to food, but the food represents love that might be absent in my life or had been in the past. 

We talked about where that thought might have originated. And I can see that there was a time in my life when that thought probably came into being and how we innocently can assume or conclude that because of the circumstances that we’ve experienced in the past, and that we now have an unwanted habit like overeating that we are substituting one thing for another. That’s where the myth comes in that we are using food as a substitute for love. 

I want to share the five things that Tania and I talked about, and explore this a little bit more and hopefully help you see what Tania has helped me to see. And what I’ve seen, during my exploration of the, the understanding that we’re exploring here are the three principles. 

The first thing that I want to share is that connected to what I’ve just explained about this idea that we’re substituting food and love is that where that thought and feeling originated doesn’t really matter. 

What really matters in this exploration is that we see it as thought. So that’s what seems to really create change, at least, it has done in my experience. And what I mean by that is, in the old paradigm of psychology, the outside in paradigm, if I had been coaching with Tania today, in that old paradigm, what we would have done is gone back to potentially where that thought originated. And then we would have dived into the feelings around when that thought originated, and the circumstances and the places perhaps where I felt an absence of love. 

And we would have dug up a lot of the painful emotions around that, and all that kind of thing. And Sydney Banks often talked about how digging into the past to him didn’t make a lot of sense. And it was for that exact reason that digging into the past brings up all these feelings within us. 

Now having said that, what I’m not implying is that we need to just bypass our past experience at all. That’s not the intention here. But what I do want to encourage you to see or to try to see is that when we’re having a thought about overeating or about a certain food, I really want you to notice that it is a thought. It’s not something written in stone, it’s not a pronouncement that’s come from someone that you can trust and believe that it’s the absolute truth. 

We’re going to talk about the truth; where you can see that what that thought is bringing is not truth.

I’ll talk about how you can tell that a thought like that isn’t true, that’s coming up in one of the points I want to make later.

Initially, I invite you to see when you have a feeling or a thought that’s similar to the one that I’ve described, the first step really would be to see it simply as a thought.

It’s creating feelings within you that thought; we can always tell what we’re thinking by the feelings that we’re having.

And for me, this situation happens at the same time, this thought and feeling so the thought is there’s not enough food on my plate. And the feeling is one of a little bit of fear, a little bit of desperation, a little bit of panic, that kind of thing. Very light. It’s not huge, but it’s definitely there. 

I invite you to notice in a situation like that, that what you’re experiencing is thought. 

The second thing I want to talk about is an experience from the past. And what I really was able to see today in my conversation with Tania. If you’ve read one of my books, the one called It’s Not About The Food, in that book, I talk about the soda habit that I had, that I’d had for like 30 years, and how when I began to explore this understanding, that habit fell away. And what I saw today was that in the past, before that habit fell away, I felt a very similar feeling about that soda that I would have every day at lunchtime.

That feeling was I need this thing, it’s a treat for me, I’m giving myself a lot of care and love by having this treat every day at lunchtime. And before I started exploring the principles, anytime I tried to let go of that habit, those feelings would rear their heads and become really tricky for me to navigate. And I was not able to do it until I came to this understanding. I quit that habit probably hundreds of times in those 30 years. But I always picked it up again, because those strong feelings of that need for love that I had projected onto the can of soda would overtake me, and I would fall back into the habit. 

What I saw today, which was really fascinating was that, since that habit has dropped away, I don’t feel any less loved.

In