Glenn Close won a 2019 Golden Globe for best actress in a movie drama. She played a renowned author’s wife in a movie called The Wife.

Here’s what she said, in part, in her acceptance speech:

“I’m thinking of my mom, who really sublimated herself to my father her whole life and in her 80s said to me I feel as I haven’t accomplished anything… and it was so not right. I feel what I’ve learned this whole experience that, women, we are nurturers, that’s what’s expected of us, we have our children, we have our husbands if we’re lucky enough, and our partners, whoever, but we have to find personal fulfillment, we have to follow our dreams, we have to say I can do that, and I should be allowed to do that.”

Personal fulfillment is something that many emotional eaters lack. We often struggle with unfulfilling jobs, unsupportive spouses, and friends that we just don’t have anything in common with anymore.

Maybe you are trying to be someone you aren’t, but think you should be. Maybe you are trying to fit into a social group that really isn’t for you, or you’re dating the gender you think you are supposed to date.

No matter how hard you try, you just can’t seem to feel happy. All this leads to a very real emptiness within you that makes you want to reach for anything to feel whole. So, then what happens? You self-medicate with food. You emotionally eat.

So much of emotional eating is about being out of alignment with your true self. When who you feel you are or want to be isn’t what you see when you look in the mirror, you end up in turmoil; emotional, physical, and mental turmoil.

You may try to ignore the turmoil by finding temporary happiness: you eat something that tastes good. But let’s face it…if a little tastes good, a lot tastes better! You aren’t hungry and you don’t know why you’re doing it, but you can’t stop eating.

Instead of trying to bury the pain by sedating yourself with food, you must listen to what your heart is saying to you. That little voice inside of you is begging you to listen, and it can’t talk to you with a mouth full of food!

When we stop emotional eating, we can hear what our heart is saying to us. We can hear what it needs to feel fulfilled. And once we know, we can take the first step to feeling like ourselves again. It’s all about finding your purpose and your passion. It’s finding what makes your heart sing!

If you don’t know what your purpose is, if you don’t know who you are, it’s time to embark on a quest. Stopping emotional eating is a great place to begin, because when you stop medicating with food you learn quickly WHY you were medicating with food. You’re able to discover what the pain is and where it came from so that you can begin healing.

Sometimes we need to determine what we DON’T WANT in order to know what we DO WANT. It’s by process of elimination that we learn what we truly desire.

What steps are you going to take to discover your purpose and passion? Glenn Close tapped into it when she was a child watching movies with her grandmother. She looked at that screen and thought: I can do this.

Sometimes we can discover clues by looking back into our childhood. Personally, I didn’t have dreams of being an emotional eating expert and coach, but I did love to act and perform. I also loved art. I loved to write and to create community. God pulled it all together into what I do now.

What did you love most about your childhood? Where were you most blissed out? What made your heart sing?

It’s time to search your heart for clues and to act on finding your purpose. This is so inextricably linked to your relationship with food! I’m not saying that if you do what you love you’ll stop emotionally eating. My experience is that you must still address emotional eating. If you’re an emotional eater, you must get help for that and learn ways to care for your body, mind and spirit so you can build a new experience and relationship with food.

But in order to live free from emotional eating you must set yourself free from old wounds, old patterns of thought, and old ways of being that include living a life that is out of alignment with who you really are. It’s time to find out now.