Posts Tagged ‘nutrition’
Inspiring Considerations 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.
All of us have our own special relationship to 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. Roger Gould, MD, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA and author of “Shrink Yourself: Break Free from Emotional Eating Forever,” defines emotional eating 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. 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. 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.
Emotional eating happens without much regard to health, nutrition, or even real hunger. 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.
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. Whenever we are feeling uncomfortable or uneasy, food is the drug that helps us take our mind off it. The more we emotionally eat, the less likely we are to focus on the real cause of our unrest.
Food presents us with a temporary respite, however. 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. 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. As soon as this understanding begins, you can start your process of recovery and your concentration on holistic nutrition concepts, based on a really solid footing.