Self Help Recovery Tools
Emotions help your brain assess a plan and prepare if action needed, for example when we feel ‘fear’ this emotion can increase heartbeat and prepare the body to escape quickly out of danger if need be. Different emotions have different feelings:
Happiness, excited, ecstatic
Sadness, hurt, miserable, teary
Angry, aggressive
Shocked, horrified, perplexed
Frightened, anxious, guilty
Confident, satisfied, relaxed, calm
Bored, tired, exhausted
We go through our life with our emotional feelings changing daily, weekly and yearly.
Emotional eating is another type of ‘hunger’ that is generated in your ‘mind’ normally when you are seeking comfort and nurture. This is different from your natural hunger which is a response and signal that your body needs fuel.
We all have emotional hunger; it usually develops in childhood and is closely associated with love, comfort and nurture. Due to these close associations it can become easy to gel our emotions to food when we eat.
We all do some emotional eating at some points throughout our life, usually when we seek a ‘quick- fix’ or ‘burst’ of feelings perhaps associated with love, comfort or nurture.
For example, you re-visited a place your parents used to take you on holiday when you where a child, and you remember eating a wafer ice-cream smothered with delicious strawberry sauce, you see the same old shop in the corner with the same sign still selling wafer ice-creams. You want to relive that memory and have a great time eating your delicious ice-cream wafer bringing back those feelings of childhood, warmth and happiness.
This is normal and happens to everyone occasionally, however if this quick fix is used too often it may become problematic. Many people can start relaying on ‘food’ to manipulate or cope with there emotional feelings.
The reason behind this may be because they cannot think of any other way of generating happy feelings or coping with feelings like ‘anger’ and ‘sadness’, so food becomes the answer. Sometimes the strongest longings for food can happen at your emotionally weakest time.
It can help to become aware of 'why' you might be putting food into your mouth when you are not naturally hungry.
It is also a good ideal to spot the trigger emotion at the time, pick it out then find a better way of dealing with it.
This anger may be associated with deprivation related with dieting and denying yourself food, or it may come from another source. Whatever the reason you need to ask yourself will you really enjoy this food and will it really take your anger away.
It takes a while for your intuition to get back on track. After some practice of raising awareness around food you should be able to recognize if you are eating because you are physically hungry or something else.
Many of these feelings will come and go throughout your life; some may stay longer than others.
Recognizing if you are emotionally eating may be a challenge for some and easy for others, here are some other types of common emotional eating: