Emotional Eating Questions

stroutman81

If you suppress your emotions by covering them with food, you're merely suppressing your ultimate happiness. You're suppressing your personal potential.

Difficult experiences and emotions are part of life. There's no getting around that. When we feed our emotions, we lose touch of the true meaning behind them. The spectrum of emotions, from happiness to sadness and frustration to jubilation, tends to blend together over time.

When we lose touch of the ability to identify our emotions clearly, we lose a sense of how to deal with life itself. Put differently, to live is to feel. And if feeling means eating, you'll eventually live to eat.

Food will become your everything. It will dominate you during the good times and the bad.

I've worked with a lot of people and among those who struggle to manage their weight there's a common thread. They all fail to manage their emotions appropriately. If they're stressed from work or family life, they're turning to food. Bored? Food. Nervous? Food. Sad? Food.

After awhile they simply patternize their reactions to feelings. The art of coping with struggle is lost as they become fixated on food. And sure, they'll employ bouts of restraint where they swear off excessive eating... but how long does it really last? It's easy to feel strongly about something one week when you know damn well that same commitment will be nonexistent the next.

Start paying attention to your emotions. Relearn what they are and what they feel like. Once you're familiar with them, then you can start doing some accounting for how you tend to respond to them. You can begin interrupting your ingrained, habitual response with one that is more conducive for long-term personal development and growth.

Sounds complex or even impossible... but start small. Commit 15 minutes or so at the end of your day to think back over challenges you faced. How did you handle them? Was food part of your solution? Was there a better coping strategy available that would have led to a more effective outcome? What does it 'cost you' to rely on food the way you do? What would it mean for the Future You if you no longer relied on food the way you do to overcome these problems?

It's amazing what can happen when you start consciously recounting, organizing, and questioning this sort of stuff.

Take it seriously!

Please share if you think this is useful.

Stay strong,

Steve

Mykaelous

I agree, this is not only important for weight loss it's important for becoming a better person. Emotions are there for a reason, they relate to tangible experiences in your life. Identify the experiences that have shaped your emotions and attempt to understand them. I couldn't stick to a diet until I realized what my relationship with food was. I related food with approval from my parents. It was when I realized this that I was able to redefine my relationship with food to be one about health and not about filling an emotional gap.

kgeyser

Thank you for posting this. I see a lot of posts on this site from people who are emotional eaters trying to combat the issue by blaming the food or shaming themselves for eating, rather than dealing with the reasons why they are standing in front of the open cupboard. It just leads to an unhealthy relationship with food and a negative self-image, and doesn't help them learn to cope with stressful situations without food. Emotions are a good thing. We all have them, even the not-so-attractive ones. And we can all learn to identify them and adopt behaviors to cope with them in a way that doesn't focus on negative feelings about food or guilt to make a change.

stroutman81

Good commentary from both of you. Thanks!

KimbersNewLife

Wow...just wow and thank you!

ukaryote

Wait, you mean eating makes you feel better? Must be the dopamine release. Eating junk food literally makes you feel better, till the dopamine wear off. it is not suppressing emotions, it literally changes them.

Ok, good to point out that much binge eating is from trying to self-medicate unhappy emotions. Other types of self-medication are also destructive.

You make it sound like managing my emotions is all up to me and entirely in my control. Perhaps you did not mean it that way. Many of us need outside help, the 15 minutes a day does not start to cover it., or we are incapable of that much. If life seems way, way overwhelming, I hope I would seek help.

charlieandcarol

There is a school of thought (and Psychology) that says that our emotional response to anything is entirely within our own control. Events/things that happen are just events or things that we can't necessarily control. What we can control is how we respond emotionally and our subsequent actions. Some people see the positive in a situation, some see the negative. Not everyone responds the same to the same event.

I have a tendency to see the negative in most things and can react very defensively. I am working on this not being my first reaction to everything because my next action after that reaction is usually to eat something. I am a work in progress.