Bright Lights: Tricia Nelson Helps Emotional Eaters Heal Their Hunger

At age 20, emotional eating expert Tricia Nelson was 50 pounds overweight. “Food was my God,” she admits.

Nelson, now 57, says she was a binge eater who had no control around food. “Carbs and sugar were my thing,” she says. “On a regular basis, I would binge eat. I would often hide food and binge alone, late at night. I felt so ashamed of my behaviors around food, not to mention around my weight.”

Nelson grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the youngest of three girls. The shame she felt around her body was compounded by sexual abuse she experienced as a child.

“I felt terrible about myself,” says Nelson, even though she was athletic, outgoing, and a leader in her school. “I had a sadness inside that fed my overeating.”

At 21, ironically after losing weight on yet another diet, Nelson hit what she describes as “a hopeless place.”

“I was so convinced that once I lost weight, I’d be happy,” she remembers. “While it was nice to be thinner, it didn’t change how I felt about myself. Plus, all the emotions I had stuffed down with food were emerging and I had no way to deal with them. Food had been my number one coping tool. I knew it was only a matter of time before I regained the weight, once again.”

Tired of yo-yo dieting, Nelson started looking for a deeper solution. While attending a Unity center, she heard a man speak about healing himself of obesity through spiritual means.

“I resonated with him, and I asked him to help me,” Nelson says. “In hindsight, he was the only person who could have helped me. He had just the right amount of tough love, personal experience, and honesty.”

Learning to Love Herself

Her new mentor taught her about self-care, including spiritual practices like meditation and prayer.

“Meditation was trial and error for me,” she says. “My mind was so busy it was difficult to be still, but I stuck with it. I also began to address the emotions I had run from for so many years. I was healing my relationship with food through healing my relationship with myself. I call it ‘weight loss from the inside out.’ It wasn’t a straight line. It was a series of surrenders of my old way of doing things. With each hurdle, I came to understand that I needed God to help me.”

Nelson went on to spend 25 years working alongside her mentor to help people who were struggling with various addictions. “It didn’t matter what the addiction was—it required deeper healing, from the inside out,” Nelson says.

At age 37, Nelson, who had grown up Protestant, had a profound realization that she needed to shift her dependence on her mentor to a true dependence on spirituality. “That was another level of healing for me,” she says. “My mentor once told me that I’m ‘God’s favorite baby daughter’ and I grabbed ahold of that. I feel like my life has been a process of coming to know that in my very heart of hearts God adores me and is always there for me.”

After growing up with sexual abuse, obesity, and low self-esteem, Nelson says she didn’t know she was good and in fact believed she was “bad.” “My journey of healing has helped me to know that I am good and that God loves me,” she says. “I want everybody to know in their heart that they’re God’s favorite baby daughter or son.”

Replacing Food with Self-Care

Nelson felt a calling to focus on helping people specifically with emotional eating, so she stopped working alongside her mentor and instead turned to the internet to reach more people. In 2017, she launched Heal Your Hunger, an online program for people who struggle with food addiction and emotional eating. She also self-published a book by the same name and started a podcast, which now lists more than 500 episodes. A speaker and coach, Nelson also trains other coaches to help more people.

Heal Your Hunger, she says, is designed to help clients “make peace with themselves so they can feel worthy of good food choices; feel worthy of treating their body with respect and love. It’s grounded in developing a sense of spiritual wholeness.” The approach works, she says, because people learn to deal with their emotions in a healthy way instead of through overeating.

“People don’t realize the extent to which they use food for emotional reasons,” Nelson explains. “There’s a disconnect. They say, ‘I need to lose weight. I need to diet,’ but they have no idea that what they really need is to overcome their emotional dependence on food.”

“Everybody says, ‘I was doing great until …’—there’s always an until,” Nelson continues. “There’s always that emotional trigger. It’s not really about your mother dying or the pandemic or changing jobs or moving cross-country. Those are events. But they trigger emotions that you feel like you can’t handle on your own, so you turn to food to help you cope. I show my clients how to expand the scope of emotions that they can handle—and that’s where spirituality comes in because turning to God instead of food is how they’re going to handle it. I’m teaching people positive tools for being able to get through anything without having food be their tool.”

The Role of Community

Nelson encourages her clients to lessen their stress through self-care practices like meditation, prayer, and writing. Community, she adds, is a big part of the process—having others to lean on is vital.

“Diets don’t work because you just take away the support of food and you don’t have anything in its place,” Nelson explains. “You can’t get through tough things if you don’t have a healthy support system.”

It’s a several-pronged process, she continues, “but it works because you’re able to quiet your cravings through addressing your stress and emotions, deepening your sense of spirituality, and feeling the loving support of others who understand and care.”

When she went to Amherst College after high school, Nelson was a fine arts major. She didn’t plan on helping people fight addiction.

“I thought about going into acting, but I didn’t have big plans,” she recalls. “I was taking it a day at a time.”

When she met her mentor, her focus shifted away from partying to spiritual practices and conversations about helping addicts recover.

“There were times when I wondered what I was doing, spending my 20s this way, but I also had a strong sense that what I was doing was important and would eventually pay off for me,” she says. “Well, it paid off in spades many years ago and now in my 50s, I can look back without regrets. I absolutely love what I do with Heal Your Hunger. I’m passionate about showing people who struggle with food and weight that there’s a nondiet path to healing. Thirty years and many intuitive decisions later, I’m finally on my dime, and I’m so grateful.”

This article appeared in the Jan/Feb 2025 issue of Spirituality & Health®: A Unity Publication. Subscribe now.