Useful Guidelines On Healing From Emotional Eating
While there is no shortage of diet books, holistic nutrition strategies and new fitness equipment on the market, the problems of being overweight and obese continue to grow with the number of people being affected by these serious 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. In other words, you eat for a variety of reasons, other than what you actually need.
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. 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.
According to Dr. Gould, we all have emotional hunger. The difference between an emotional eater and a non-emotional eater is how they respond to this hunger. If somebody is challenged, the emotional eater would reach for whatever food will supply a moment of comfort quickly. Comfort foods do not represent healthy choices and are far from what we might term “holistic nutrition,” such as heavy pastas, refined carbohydrates, ice cream and other fast foods.
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. 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. And worst of all, now there are usually new feelings of guilt, remorse, anger, and isolation once you have given in to the emotional eating.
There is a very large difference between wanting to change and actually changing. 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.
Before you will be able to overcome these issues and start the healing process, you need to understand how an addiction to food can be very powerful and may mask underlying issues that lead to the emotional eating in the first place. Once this understanding begins to take form, holistic nutrition can ‘set the stage’ for a long term, yet full recovery.