Amazing Suggestions 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. There must be something else going on here.
We all seem to have some kind of relationship with food. After all, we seem to use it to stem our emotional hunger, quite apart from using it to satisfy any physical hunger pangs. If we educate ourselves about why we eat and why we choose the particular foods that we do, we start to see how our emotions play a pivotal 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.
At one point or another, we all take part in emotional eating behavior. 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. But when this condition goes too far, it crosses the line into food addiction, where you actually lose control 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. Eating itself is very hurried, with little regard paid to what is actually being eaten and when we approach consumption this way, we are very likely to overeat.
When we are looking for security and solace, food can offer us a safety net and a refuge and a relief from emotional stress and discomfort. 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.
But food is just a temporary bandage. The feeling that drove you to emotionally eat in the first place is still there, and will quickly return. 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. This is why it is so important to examine how your relationship to food triggers your 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.