Emotional Eating

We all comfort ourselves with food sometimes but it’s the degree to which we do so that is significant. When does it become a genuine problem in our lives? For most people, the threads of our relationships with food and the act of eating can be endlessly intricate, and they are woven deeply into our thoughts patterns and emotional composition. Strong — perhaps even lifelong — connections with food often trace directly to our childhoods.

Behind every emotional food craving is a very personal set of thoughts, feelings and emotions. As you expose them to light, the hidden rewards and punishments begin to lose their power and you regain control.  It all starts with your willingness to thoroughly accept, stop judging, and start exploring what's underneath your cravings.

Emotional Eating - Feeding Your Feelings

Eating to feed a feeling, and not a growling stomach, is emotional eating!!!

Instead of the physical symptom of hunger initiating the eating, a thought and an emotion triggers feelings that activate the eating.

1. Emotional hunger comes on suddenly; physical hunger occurs gradually.

2. When you are eating to fill a void that isn't related to an empty stomach, you crave a specific food, and only that food will meet your need. When you eat because you are actually hungry, you're open to options.

3. Emotional hunger feels like it needs to be satisfied instantly with the food you crave; physical hunger can wait.

4. Even when you are full, if you're eating to satisfy an emotional need, you're more likely to keep eating. When you're eating because you're hungry, you're more likely to stop when you're full.

5. Emotional eating leave behind feelings of guilt; eating when you are physically hungry does not.

Comfort foods are foods a person eat to obtain/maintain OR suppress a feeling. Culturally, Ice cream is first on the comfort food list. After ice cream, comfort foods break down by sex: For women it's chocolate and cookies; for men it's pizza, steak, and casserole.

The first thing one need to do to overcome emotional eating is to recognize it! And this means to seek out professional help.

Stress – Old and New

It won’t surprise you to know that stress, and how you react to it, can be tangled up in your eating patterns. Stress presses your body’s panic button, and unleashes a cascade of internal chemical reactions that affect your feelings and your body. Stress activates your fight-or-flight response with the release of adrenaline and cortisol. This process can alter your digestion and your relationship with food. If you stay stressed for long periods, your body’s daily cortisol cycle will spiral out of whack, upsetting the normal internal conversation. Chronic stress allows these effects to continue indefinitely and you risk Adrenal Exhaustion, Hyper/hypothyroidism, Depression, SAD (Seasonal affective disorder) and other health issues like Insulin Resistance, Diabetes and Hypoglycemia.

Stress is not a disease or a symptom- it is a response that has a biological affect and repetitivevly will become a behavior.  To change our response to stress is to let go of our old re-action to OLD and PAINFUL triggers. In NLP it is called an Imprint – in psychology a Engram – When you are able to accept all circumstances in your life as a RESPONSIBLE individual fully knowing that you have created then with your thoughts, you let go of VICTIMIZATION – you accept WHAT IT IS and start   Living in the NOW!

Emotional eating - Healing starts with awareness!

Whether we are using well-loved foods to calm ourselves, or depriving ourselves of them as punishment, we are preoccupying ourselves with food to prevent unwanted feelings, including — but not limited to — the big ones: anger, fear, despair, and shame…Emotional eating has its roots in actual emotions.  We frequently use food to feel better emotionally. As children, many of us were rewarded with sweets for being “good boy/girls.” Many unconsciously mimic this reassurance by rewarding themselves with comfort food that’s filled with sugar or other refined carbs.  Sweet treats trigger the release of serotonin, the feel-good hormone, though it’s only temporary.

When you're happy, your food of choice could be steak or pizza, when you're sad it could be ice cream or cookies, and when you're bored it could be potato chips. Food does more than fill our stomachs -- it also satisfies feelings, and when you quench those feelings with comfort food when your stomach isn't growling, that's emotional eating.

What are you really hungry for?

Many of us don’t realize the degree to which food issues affect their physical and emotional health. But it’s critically important to uncover your unique emotional link to food in order to reset that connection, and move on. The important thing to realize is that many of these adverse patterns are set in childhood and are often associated with buried emotional pain.

Across the spectrum of emotional eaters, adverse childhood associations can sometimes manifest as serious eating disorders much later in life.

Women with eating disorders often connect the food they eat directly to their body image. They create an equation between their “ugly” this or that body part and food. Sadly, these women think they can “just stop eating” at any time to improve the way they look.

For women and girls with anorexia or bulimia, there is an uncontrollable urge to limit what they eat, or to “purge” its aftereffects. These unhealthy patterns help maintain an uneasy sense of control over life that allows the sufferer to avoid facing the emotional pain so often at the heart of her disorder.

Because of its emotional component I strongly recommend you seek out the services of a professional that has expertise and credentials in psychoneuro-therapy and Nutrition. If you are interrested to have my workshop "Emotional Eating - Loving the Monster" at your facility contact me I will be glad to present it to your clients/patients.

Think about that!

Bulimia: Hopeless terror a frantic stuffing-purging of Self-hatred – not loving self

Anorexia: Extreme Fear and denying oneself of life