There is a Great Hunger underlying the following three dysfunctional eating situations. Can you guess what it is?

Scenario Number 1:  Empty Ellen

You come home from work, drained—feeling empty.  A bit hungry, too.  You can barely wait to get something to eat, so you grab something out of the frig that is easy to find, even before you get yourself settled and comfortable.  Before you know it, you’ve eaten too much.  And then it’s too late.  You feel bad about yourself.  Perhaps that triggers a full-out binge.  Perhaps that’s all it takes for you to give up hope.  There’s a sinking feeling in your stomach, as you wonder if this pattern will ever change.

Great Hunger: Your Great Hunger is created by trying to function on a near-empty tank of gas.

False Solution: Trying too hard to control your eating patterns.  Dieting once again.

True Solution: You’ve disconnected from yourself during the day.  You’ve lost sight of your own needs for rest, nurture and self-care.  You’ve put your body on auto-pilot so that you can accomplish and produce.  This is the masculine solution. It doesn’t work for women.  Women produce best when they’ve nurtured themselves well.  You can’t possibly take care of yourself once you’ve let yourself get this far out-of-balance.  You MUST learn how to Satisfy the Great Hunger of your Inner Lover and your Divine Magical Child. Both these aspects of you are being denied.  You think it’s about food.  It’s not.  You will continue to spin-out on this pattern until you’ve learned how to come back to yourself as a woman and get your needs for love and play met.

Scenario Number 2: Lonely Lesley

You’ve spent some time with your boyfriend and you notice that you’re feeling a bit of anxiety when he leaves.  There’s something not working quite right in the relationship but you’re not sure what.  Actually, if you took the time to think, write or talk about it, you’d know exactly what isn’t right.  But you’re afraid to face your true feelings because you’re afraid that you may discover that he’s not the right guy for you.  The alternatives are even worse!  You cringe at the thought of being alone or of having to start dating again.  It’s easy to just push all these feelings aside and go grab a bowl of ice-cream.

Great Hunger: Your hunger is for Self-Love and the resulting experience is emptiness and aloneness.  Whatever the need this guy is filling for you, (companionship, fun, sex) has to be met internally first so that you don’t need him or any other guy to fill you up.

False Solution: Find a guy to fill the hole.  Focus too much on food to drown out the real feelings.

True Solution: Satisfy the Great Hunger inside of you for Self-Love by first loving all parts of yourself—including the conflict.  You have parts of you that want to keep him in your life and parts that want to push him away.  It will take guts to face the conflict inside of you—including your fears of being alone and your dread of dating again.  But, as long as you continue to try to keep someone in your life that isn’t supporting your growth and giving you what you most need—joy, love, ecstasy—it may be time to stop using him as a drug to fill your void and take the time instead to learn how to really fulfill yourself.  Eventually the perfect people will show up and it will be fun!  He may even turn out to be that perfect person—once you’ve handled your own internal unmet need for love.

Scenario Number 3: Controlling Cathy

You’ve white knuckled it once more and stayed on your diet perfectly for the past 2 months.  You’ve lost some weight and feel good about that, but the thought of having to white knuckle it for another few months is daunting.  You don’t think you can do it.  In fact, you know you can’t do it!  What to do now?

Your Great Hunger: there is a deep subconscious underlying fear that you’re not willing to face.  You’re trying too much to control your life.  Underlying this kind of controlling pattern, there is a great fear of letting go and flowing.  The capacity to let go and flow is a feminine quality and most of us have disconnected ourselves from.   But it’s the easiest thing to do once we give ourselves permission and find it again!

False Solution: keep trying to manage your body and your food so that you don’t lose too much control.

True Solution: allow yourself to face the fear of losing control.  When we work too hard and try to manage our lives too much, we close down.  This is a perfect example of becoming closed and over-driven into the masculine side of life—trying too hard to get results.  It’s time to relax the control, allow yourself to open up and face the fears that emerge as you open and become more receptive.  Fear of receptivity is what is underlying this pattern.  The Great Hunger is for the juicy aliveness that comes with open receptivity, which means giving up the brittle and rigid control demonstrated by Controlling Cathy’s attempt to stay on her diet.