TA Taster Workshop "Food, Curious Food!"

Event price: £15.00

Booking details: https://bit.ly/TAWorkshop_Food_Eating

Food is fuel to the animals, but for us it can represent so much more and hold such great meaning. If you'd like better to understand your eating habits and how to change them, then this workshop is for you! You'll uncover what motivates your decisions around eating, and with this understanding you'll be able to make different choices. Ditch the diets and come with us on a journey of discovery about they ways you might be using food, and how you can change them. 

What does food and eating mean to you? When you achieve some goal, do you celebrate with an edible treat? When you're feeling low, does your favourite chocolate bar lift your spirits? And then what follows?... some feel guilty, while others feel satisfied. 

You can use food to avoid all sorts of difficult emotions, like anger, loneliness, and boredom, while you might use it to amplify pleasurable feelings, like joy and excitement. Our relationship with food and eating is complex - it represents far more than simply 'refuelling'.  

The complexities of eating and food Beyond your personal experiences, there are also social aspects to eating. We know that sharing in a meal has held great significance throughout humankind's history. Indeed, the renowned civil rights activist, Cesar Chavez, famously said, "The people who give you their food, give you their heart". We strengthen and deepen important relationships over a shared meal, and express our trust and acceptance of those we eat with. 

In recent decades it's become very evident that many people struggle to resist the alure of the myriad of highly processed and extremely tasty food products that surround us. Your brain is designed to drive eating choices and behaviours that ensure your survival when food is scarce. Frustratingly, those same survival drives don't serve you so well when food is abundant, so they make it difficult to resist overeating. All of these factors mean that eating can become an emotionally charged experience, and we might try to escape those highly charged emotions by doing more of the very thing that's causing them - eating. The solution to a problematic relationship with food does not lie in the food, but within you and understanding your emotions around food. The ancient Greek storyteller, Aesop, wrote, "A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety". 

Your trainers for this workshop:

Rebecca Clark specialises in working with people who have an emotional motivation to eat. Her work with individuals through dialogue enables them to understand how they're using food to meet an emotional need. Once she's opened up the underlying motivators for eating, Rebecca supports her clients in meeting their emotional needs in ways that are useful to them, rather than resorting to the 'emotional anaesthetic' of food. Rebecca's clients have found this process transformative, and she provides ongoing support in group work and online forums. 

Neil Keenan is a Transactional Analysis Psychotherapist and has worked with people struggling with more serious eating disorders. In some cases, early life trauma continues to cause distress in the present, which, in turn, can lead to disordered eating and serious health problems. Neil meets with clients in psychotherapy sessions to help them address those more deeply rooted problems. When his clients have healed from their past traumas, they are then psychologically strong enough to make changes in their eating habits.  

Neil and Rebecca look forward to meeting with you at their co-hosted workshop, 'Food, Curious Food!', at 6pm on Wednesday 26th April 2023, at Goldney House in Chipping Sodbury. Refreshments are provided... and they're all guilt-free!