using food for helplessness & hopelessness

Emotional Eating: Rebalancing Your Relationship to Food


FRIDAY, APRIL 05, 2013 | POSTED BY DR. GOULD



Just like everything you know how to do in your life, you learned emotional eating—it was not something you were born with.

Somewhere in your life, eating and the taste of food (distraction) provided an instant (temporary) relief from whatever emotional stress was confronting you at the time.

And, because emotional eating worked once, you continued repeating it. It became your default switch for handling emotional distress...a shortcut to feeling good, and your coping mechanism of choice.

Fast forward to today and you simply find yourself too dependent on this coping mechanism. i.e. your relationship to food is off-balance.

And aside from the unwanted pounds, this shortcut to feeling better ensures you avoid doing what is really necessary to resolve the stress, depression and anxiety confronting you in your life.

In other words: it stunts your emotional growth.

Rebalancing your relationship to food is not going to happen by simply reading this blog post. For many of you, emotional eating now feels like an essential part of you—which is completely understandable.

The reality, however, is that emotional eating can be unlearned; and realizing this is one of the first steps to rebalancing your relationship to food.

Again: emotional eating can be unlearned; and realizing this is one of the first steps to rebalancing your relationship to food.

Here's the very first step. And next week, I'll be discussing the second.

Step 1. Confronting Denial

Everyone who is addicted to food is in some form of denial because it's denial that fends off two far worse feelings: helplessness and hopelessness.

These two monsters hang over your life like a dark shadow and their voices sound something like this, "Why know all about something I can't ever do anything about?"

In other words, deep down you know that you know your relationship to food is off-balance and that you have an emotional eating problem, but you're reluctant to do anything about it because you don't think you can.

Fortunately, you're not in complete denial—otherwise you wouldn't be reading this.

I'd like you to start, then, by asking yourself a simple question: What will my life be like if I don't begin to change my eating habits?

This is what one of my patients, let's call her Maggie, said:

"I will simply not lose weight or even gain weight; I will focus more and more on eating as a source of pleasure and I think this will diminish me as a human being, and prevent me from growing and focusing on things that are worth it."

i.e. Maggie realized she'd be stunting her emotional growth.

This negative vision of the future is a strong motivator to do something in the present, but it's still not strong enough to combat the compulsion to overeat that lurks beneath the surface.

In order to do that you need to start identifying the reasons you overeat in the first place. i.e. the emotions that you're trying to avoid, and the situations in which those emotions arise.

For Maggie, she realized as she worked through this that she'd eat when no one was home because she was lonely. And as she began letting this secret out of her bag and acknowledging it to herself, she began letting go of denial and making real progress.

Her helplessness and hopelessness were dealt a very healthy blow. Just as yours can be.

Please do not let this exercise overwhelm you. Self-examination does require some effort, but it's effort well spent, and effort that will start bringing about the change you seek in your life.

And as always, please remember to exercise patience and kindness to yourself as you do some digging to try and let some secrets out of your own bag. We are all works in progress. And we always will be.