From: Nancy Desjardins R.N.C.P.
All of us have our own special relationship to food. We use food to satisfy our physical hunger and sometimes to quell our emotional hunger as well. While there is no shortage of diet books and new fitness equipment, the problems of being overweight and obese continue to grow with the number of people being affected by these serious but prevent-able conditions. WHAT IS EMOTIONAL EATING?
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. Ac-cording to Roger Gould, M.D, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA and author of “Shrink Yourself: Break Free from Emotional Eating Forever,” emotional eating can most simply be defined as eating to satisfy emotional hunger.
In this fashion, you use food for comfort or as a way to cope 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, but when this condition goes too far, developing a food addiction becomes a real threat as you lose control over what and how you eat. Reaching for chocolate after a disagreement with your spouse or com-forting yourself after a grueling meeting at work with an entire pizza are prime examples of emotional eating.
WHY DO WE DO IT?
Dr. Gould points out that all of us have emotional hunger. The difference between an emotional eater and a non-emotional eater is how they respond to this hunger. When presented with a challenge, an emotional eater has a knee-jerk reaction to reach for whatever food will offer him a moment of comfort. These foods are usually specific foods and fall on the not-so-healthy scale. Ice cream, refined carbohydrates, heavy pastas and fast-food are common emotional-eating foods of choice.
In this sense, eating happens without much regard to health, nutrition, or even real hunger. In fact, eating is usually hurried, with very little awareness of what is being consumed. 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. Emotional eaters are more prone to overeating as food becomes the drug that distracts us from whatever discomfort we are feeling. The more we emotionally eat, the less likely we are to focus on the real cause of our unrest.
Food is just a temporary bandage. Feelings of guilt, remorse, anger, and isolation can quickly follow after giving in to emotional eating and, worst of all, the feeling that drove you to emotionally eat in the first place is still there. HOW DO I HEAL FROM IT? First of all, you already know the struggle between wanting to change something and actually changing it. For someone who is prone to emotional eating, the lines between feeling physical hunger and emotional hunger can begin to blur.
This is why it is so important to become aware of how your relationship to food triggers your behavior. Understanding food addiction’s powerful grasp and the underlying issues stemming from emotional eating are paramount in helping us to recover and heal.
Developing coping skills that are not food-focused—with the help of a trained health professional, a support group, or a program that addresses the underlying causes of a food addiction—are effective interventions that can break this cycle permanently. They offer life-long coping skills to thrive in an emotionally and physically healthy life.
Because your habits, even your way of thinking of things, took years to develop, you must allow yourself the same patience that you would extend to someone else tackling a new skill. Dr. Elson Haas, founder of the Preventive Medical Center of Marine, CA. mentions that you will need “greater attentiveness and a will-ingness to deal openly with emotions and other adversities that may block your way to healing.
You Are Never Too Old or Too Young to Make Changes to Improve the Quality of Your Life Whether you are an emotional eater or a nail-biter, you’re not alone. Unhealthy habits run the range of extremes from the benign to those that threaten our health and livelihoods. The truth about unhealthy habits is that they hold you back from your true potential.
But here’s the thing: You can choose to change them! You don’t have to be handicapped by these habits because you can make new decisions starting today—like kicking your sugar habit—that will change your entire future. The good habits that revolve around your desire for health, happiness, financial independence, and success are life-enhancing.
On the other hand, the unhealthy habits that revolve around your fears hold you back; they interfere with your success. Most people don’t make the connection between effective habit-forming methods and their effects on mental processes. However, the mental skills you need to battle habits and replace them with good ones can be learned in the same way that practice and repetition improves physical skills.
Once you make the conscious decision that your old habits aren’t helping you achieve your goals— that they are, in fact, holding you back— you can begin choosing the new habits that you would like to adopt. And, it doesn’t matter where you are in your life. You might be fresh out of college or an experienced adult over 40. You are never too old or too young to make changes that will improve the quality of your life.
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