Eating issues can arise after trauma… but have you ever considered how food might be able to help you heal?

I work with a lot of clients who have been through deeply traumatic experiences that I can scarcely imagine. And that trauma manifests in a variety of ways, from headaches and sore stomachs to trouble sleeping, hypervigilance, fatigue, difficulty concentrating… the list goes on.

As a dietitian, you may think my role in these cases is to help the people who use food as their way of coping. Maybe they binge eat as a way to numb their emotions, or perhaps they rigidly control their food as a way to feel in control of their lives again. And you’d be absolutely right… but that’s only part of it. It actually goes much wider than that.

These kinds of capital-T traumas usually cause the nervous system to go on high alert – stuck in a perpetual kind of fight-or-flight mode – which creates all kinds of issues. If you then layer on not eating enough or going for long periods of the day without eating, etc., I think this reinforces to the caveman part of your brain that you are unsafe. For my clients who have undergone traumatic experiences, their bodies are so primed for danger that their reaction to this is even stronger than usual.

And honestly, even if you haven’t undergone major trauma, you may still be stressing your body out by doing this. Have you ever considered that your sensitive stomach, your anxiety, your wild swings in appetite… they may not be the problems, but rather the symptoms of a dysregulated nervous system.

And how can you food help when food feels like the very issue you’re trying to overcome?

It took me over a decade to develop the Food Freedom Framework that I use with all of my clients, and it is incredibly effective for clients whose nervous systems have gone haywire. One of the first steps is to eat regularly, and with clients who have undergone trauma I focus very heavily on this step.

Eating regularly does not just mean “eat every few hours”. It’s all about how you eat every few hours:

• Put your food on a plate
• Sit down
• Take 3 deep breaths in through the nose and slowly out of the mouth
• Tell yourself “I am safe”
• And then eat

I believe that eating in a calm fashion like this is a very powerful (and incredibly overlooked) way to help calm the nervous system. You are showing that caveman part of your brain that you are safe enough to eat. There’s no threat to you that means you can’t eat or there’s not enough time to eat or there’s too many other pressing issues that eating isn’t important. You are safe enough to eat.

Eating as many of your meals and snacks as you can in this way (and making sure to never skip meals or snacks) signals to your own body over and over again that you are safe. And this helps it to make the shift from the sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight) to parasympathetic (rest-and-digest).

And the benefits go deeper than just feeling calmer.

Many of my clients struggle with excess body weight, even if they eat very little. This isn’t a sign that their body is failing them, it’s actually a sign that it’s doing exactly what it should be doing.

When the body is under threat, eating understandably drops down the priority list. Heck, there’s no time to stop for a meal when you’re on the run from a sabre tooth tiger, is there?So when you do get a chance to eat, it’s natural for the body to make up for it by making you hungrier than normal and suppressing your fullness hormones so that you can eat more than usual in one sitting. And it clings on to the calories and stores as much fat tissue as it can, because in caveman times that extra padding was a layer of protection in case the threat came back and food dropped off the priority list again.

Yes, there may also be some emotional eating at play and other things like that, but the biological drivers behind this are incredibly strong and incredibly misunderstood.

Too often my clients think the answer is to eat less, when in fact eating less is only going to increase the perceived threat!

They need to calm the nervous system through regular eating instead. Because when their body feels safe, that’s when it will naturally start to settle at its happy weight – the weight that is naturally sustainable for them.

And bonus: when their nervous system is calmer and their brain is being fed regularly throughout the day, it also becomes much, much easier to think clearly and regulate emotions. Which means they can engage much more meaningfully in any deeper therapeutic work they’re doing.

This is the reason why when clients ask me if they should engage in therapy first to “get their mind right”, thinking this will fix their eating issues, I point out that that’s not actually how it works. Eating is going to help the mind and then we get a good positive cycle going! This is why working through the steps of my Food Freedom Framework will actually help them to get the most out of therapy.

If you would like the cheat sheet of the Food Freedom Framework, it’s part of my free swag bag for health professionals! Grab it here.