Inspiring Tips On Healing From Emotional Eating
You will find a large number of diet books, strategies about holistic nutrition and “get fit” equipment available these days, but the serious problem of obesity and weight gain continues to grow, as a large number of people are affected by these significant, but preventable conditions. Something else must be going on here.
We all seem to have some kind of relationship with food. We don’t just use food to satisfy our physical hunger; we sometimes use it to quell our emotional hunger as well. As we learn more and more about why we eat and why we choose the foods we eat, we begin to understand how our emotions play such an instrumental role in our health. In the book “Shrink Yourself: Break Free from Emotional Eating Forever,” Roger Gould, M.D., the Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA, says that emotional eating is a way of satisfying emotional hunger. By doing this, you are just using food as a way of coping, to comfort yourself and to deal with life. That means you eat for reasons other than what your body needs.
We all indulge in emotional eating at one point or another. For example, you could consume an entire pizza after a bad day at work, or comfort yourself by eating chocolate if you have had an argument with your significant other. These examples of emotional eating can go too far, however, and cross the line into food addiction, as this is where you lose control completely over what and how you eat.
Dr. Gould points out that all of us have emotional hunger. The way in which we respond to hunger establishes the difference between a non-emotional eater and an emotional eater. If somebody is challenged, the emotional eater would reach for whatever food will supply a moment of comfort quickly. Our comfort foods are usually not the healthiest of choices – and are certainly far from a holistic nutrition approach, generally including ice cream, refined carbohydrates, heavy pastas and fast food.
We pay little regard to nutrition, health or even real hunger when we engage in emotional eating. In fact, eating is usually hurried, with very little awareness of what is being consumed, and therefore emotional eaters are more prone to overeating.
Food offers relief from stress or emotional discomfort and provides a refuge and safety net that we can quickly turn to for solace and security. Food becomes the drug that distracts us from whatever discomfort we are feeling. By focusing on our emotional eating habits, we ignore the real cause of the issue.
But food is just a temporary bandage. Whatever is causing you to emotionally eat will inexorably return to haunt you. When this happens, not only will you have the original issue to deal with, but you will now have new feelings of remorse, anger and guilt associated with the emotional eating, itself.
Wanting to change something and actually changing it are two different things. For someone who is prone to emotional eating, the lines between feeling physical hunger and emotional hunger can begin to blur. You need to examine how your relationship to food actually promotes this type of behavior.
Understanding food addiction’s powerful grasp and the underlying issues that lead us to emotional eating are paramount in helping us to recover and heal. Once this understanding begins to take form, holistic nutrition can ‘set the stage’ for a long term, yet full recovery.
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