Overcome Emotional Eating With “Parts Work”

Understand the inner dynamics that lead to emotional eating and how to overcome them.

You are probably asking yourself, “What the heck is parts work and how can it help me with emotional eating?”

Great question. Let’s dive in.

Parts Work 101

Parts Work is all about helping you navigate your inner world, which is where your emotions and your thoughts live.

It’s a common misconception that your inner world is made up of just one solitary you. That there should only be one voice in your head, only one feeling you’re feeling, only one thought you are thinking.

But this is just not the case.

In reality, you have a whole bunch of different parts of you that live in your inner world, and all of these different parts of you have different roles and responsibilities.

Let’s make this practical: How many times have you said something like, “Well, a part of me wants this, but another part of me wants something else?”

Or how many times have you felt multiple feelings at the same time? That’s because at least two different parts of you are experiencing two different feelings.

I’ll give you an example for myself. When I see a piece of cake, immediately I’ve got a part that wants to eat it.

But soon after, another part of me usually pops up who is like, “You better not eat that piece of cake.”

Like, who can relate to this?

These are the conversations happening inside of our head all the time. Every time I see a piece of cake, my parts start talking to each other.

This is parts and this is where we start getting into the dynamics of emotional eating, too. We’ll get into even more about emotional eating in a second.

But right now I want you to understand that parts work is about learning how to navigate this conversation between these two parts in a way that allows us to achieve our goals and feel good as we do it.

Parts Work Summary

Now you know that your inner world now is made up of a bunch of different parts of playing a bunch of different roles to try to protect you, help you get love, and help get your needs met.

But you’ve also got another energy inside of you that I am sure you have also experienced at times in your life. It is your Essence.

There are lots of great words to describe your Essence. Some people call it their “center.” I like calling it “The Love Inside of You.” Also, your “Inner Leader” is a great name for it. You might even call it your “soul” or the Holy Spirit or source energy or your higher self, depending on what your spirituality is. (For more on your Essence, check out this article.)

I’m just going to call your essence for now, okay?

So your inner world is made up of a whole bunch of different parts of you that are trying to help you get your needs met as well as your Essence that is there to support your parts with love and with wisdom.

Parts work is about building a stronger relationship between your parts and your Essence in your inner world, which allows you to have more influence over your behaviors in the outer world.

Does that make sense? When we can learn how to navigate our inner world effectively and have effective conversations between our parts, we are able to show up in the outer world more powerfully and intentionally.

Would you rather have the voices in your head be like a bunch of ten year-olds screaming at each other or as a group of adults that are all working together?

Can you see how changing that dynamic in your inner world would make a big difference in the way that you show up in the outer world and the way that you navigate emotional eating?

No Bad Parts

There is one last thing I need you to know about your parts. It’s really, really important, okay? Like if you take nothing else away from this, please, please, please take this in.

You have no bad parts.

Every single part of you has the intention to protect you and help you. This doesn’t mean that the outcome and their behavior is always helpful, but their intention is to help.

Every single part of you is doing their very, very best to help you get a need met.

This is an important foundation to build from in order to overcome emotional eating. Here’s why…

Your Emotional Eating Part

Now let’s apply this to emotional eating.

Typically with emotional eating, two parts are involved. Starting, of course, with the Emotional Eating Part. This is the part of you that is trying to help you feel better through food.

I mean, look at her.

She’s eating her pizza, drinking her drink, taking a selfie because she’s feeling great. Hearts are floating around her. Like, who would not want to feel this good right? This is how your emotional eating part is trying to help you feel.

As humans, we are pleasure seeking creatures that want to avoid pain. Our Emotional Eating Parts are only ever trying to help us stop feeling so badly and start feeling freaking amazing. That is their positive intention at the root of their behavior.

Okay, now remember what I said about how the outcome of our parts’ is behavior isn’t always helpful? There are definitely times when the outcome of emotional eating leaves your body not feeling so great, right? I’m not denying that. All I want to do here is put this Emotional Eating Part in the context of its positive intention to help.

Even this part is not a bad part of you. There is just sometimes a gap between it’s helpful intention and it’s not-so-helpful outcome.

Okay, so are you ready for the second part that’s involved in emotional eating? Do you think you know what it is?

Your Manager Part

I’ll call this next part your Manager Part. This is the part of you trying to help you achieve your health goals.

This part is focused on the bottom line and often views the Emotional Eating Part as a bad part that’s getting in the way of achieving your goals. This Manager Part is the part that’s like, “You better not eat that piece of cake!”

The positive intention of this Manager Part is to help you achieve your goals. And like, who doesn’t want to achieve their goals, right? This is definitely not a bad part. This is an important part.

But let’s also talk about outcomes here as well. Because let’s be real, this Manager Part quite often uses shame and criticism as a tactic to try to help you achieve your goals.

This is the part that likes to use words like “should” and “shouldn’t,” and the manager part can start shaming the Emotional Eating Part for the outcome of its behavior without taking it’s positive intention into consideration.

I don’t know about you, but all of that shame just makes my Emotional Eating Part want to eat more to help me feel better and get rid of the shame, you know?

The more this Manager Part shames and criticizes, the more the Emotional Eating Part wants to help by eating more. And the more the Emotional Eating Part tries to make me feel better through eating, the more extreme the shame and criticism becomes. It becomes this crazy negative spiral and man, it can sure start spiraling really fast and get really scary really quick, can’t it?

So eating can really turn into a full out war between the Emotional Eating Part and the Manager Part.

This war is painful. It’s scary. It’s lonely. It’s absolutely no fun. And nobody wins.

This is why after we’ve tried dieting a few times, we can be like, “No way. Not again. I don’t even want to try to improve my health anymore because it just becomes a war between my parts and it can get so bad that my entire life becomes consumed by it.”

Not to mention it’s really, really hard for anybody to win here because when these parts of you are in a war, you’re definitely not feeling good, which is what the emotional eating part is trying to help you with. And it’s so much harder to achieve your health goals when so much of your energy is wasted on criticizing yourself and “shoulding” on yourself.

Luckily, this war is not your destiny.

There is a completely different way to navigate and overcome emotional eating; one that allows you to both feel good and achieve your health goals. It looks like this:

Where both parts are working together to help you feel better and help you achieve your goals. It gets to be like this. These parts can learn how to work together instead of war against each other.

So how do you go from these cards warring with one another to these parts working together? There are two key steps.

Step 1: Establish Your Essence As The Inner Leader

The first step is to establish your Essence as the inner leader — as the mediator that goes between the two parts and charts the best path forward.

This is important because neither your Emotional Eating Part or Manager Parts are great leaders.

The Emotional Eating Part isn’t a great leader because it doesn’t have discernment about when it’s outcome will actually be helpful or not and it’s not very focused on helping you feel good for the long-term.

The Manager Part also isn’t a great leader because great leaders don’t use shame or criticism. Not to mention this part can get extremely rigid about the “right” and “wrong” thing when the most sustainable path to achieving any goal requires more flexibility and nuance.

It is only your Essence that has the discernment of when it is going to be more nourishing to eat that piece of cake and when it would be more nourishing to pass. Your Essence also has a better perspective about what’s most important, why you are wanting to improve your health or change your body, and what you need to have a good time every step of the way.

Are you ready for a really simple way to start establishing your essence as an internal leader? It doesn’t have to be super woo woo. It can be actually very, very practical.

Allow me to introduce you to the eight C’s of your Essence (as described by the Internal Family Systems modality):

• Curiosity
• Calmness
• Clarity
• Compassion
• Confidence
• Creativity
• Courage
• Connectedness

These eight C-words describe the characteristics of your Essence. There are also five P-words that describe your Essence as well (also sourced from the IFS modality):

• Presence
• Power
• Perspective
• Playfulness
• Purpose

All of these qualities are trailheads that lead you into more of your Essence. So, when you find yourself getting caught in the battle between your Emotional Eating Part and your Manager Part, I want you to look at this list of C and P qualities and ask yourself:

Which of these qualities do I need most right now?

Do you need more compassion for yourself as a human, doing your very, very best? Do you need more connectedness to others? Do you need to zoom out a bit and get a better perspective or to add more playfulness in your health journey?

Even just taking a second when you’re feeling overwhelmed and asking yourself this question will allow you to access more of your Essence and cut through some of that negative momentum of your parts that are warring with one another.

Another great question to ask is:

Which of these qualities is most accessible to me right now?

Because you might be really needing more compassion, but because your Manager Part is coming in so strong with the shaming, having compassion for yourself might not be accessible in that moment. But maybe you can access more curiosity about why your Manager Part or your Emotional Eating Part seems extra agitated today, and what they might be really needing.

Or maybe you can find some presence to orient yourself back to this moment instead of getting lost in the past or the stories your parts are telling about the future.

I’m telling you, the more you can establish your Essence as the leader of this weight loss ship or this getting healthy ship, the more successful you will be at actually achieving your goals. And, most importantly in my opinion, the more fun you will have every step of the way.

Step 2: Get To Know Your Unique Emotional Eating and Manager Parts

The second step to ending the emotional eating war is to build a relationship with your unique Emotional Eating and Manager Parts. For instance, they might even want different names as you get to know them.

I have given you a very broad overview of these parts in general, but your very own Emotional Eating and Manager Parts have their own stories of how they came to be.

How did your emotional eating part come to choose food as their go to?

Where did your manager part learn to speak with so much shame and “shoulds”? They learned that from somewhere.

The more of a relationship you can build with these parts of you through getting to know them more and validating their helpful intentions, the more they will trust you, as your Essence, to lead them out of the war and into a reality where they are working together — where they both get to feel good and reach their goals.

So how exactly, do you build a relationship with your unique parts?

Boom.

I created a worksheet that will help you do exactly that.

It’s called the Meet A Part of You Worksheet and it walks you through step by step how to start conversing with any part of you. You can download it for free right here.

I highly recommend you download it and fill it out for both your Emotional Eating Part and your Manager Part.

This alone will build so much trust and your inner world. Not to mention folks usually come away with some massive “AHAs” After meeting their unique parts for the first time. You might be surprised at how much relief and how much more understanding you get from just filling out this workbook.

I encourage you to see for yourself.

Learn More About Parts Work

There is so much more I can talk about in terms of your parts and how to work with them most effectively. (It’s a whole thing.) So if you’d like to learn more, there are tons of resources on my website.

I also created an entire course dedicated to helping you master parts work so you can navigate your inner world like a boss. It will walk you through step-by-step how to transform even the most hectic inner world into inner peace. It’s called Parts Work Academy and you can check it out right here.

If you want to learn more about emotional eating, my friend Rachel created a fantastic mini-course on emotional eating that you can check out right here.

Here are more parts work articles you might be interested in: