subject: Emotional Eating Examples [print this page] Food is normally a source of solace or celebration. Painful emotions often bring about problem eating. If you believe blue, sad, lonely, or bored, you can consider food. Some people reference food as his or her good friend since it is easily accessible and yes it pushes troubles on the background. But even pleasant feelings can produce overeating. Many people celebrate social events with food, and feeling happy can result in eating more than you want.
A lot of people use food to flee the pain and dissatisfaction built into everyday life. No one feels happy all the time, but some people feel unhappy or blah usually. The former is the normal state of things, but the latter state is likely to be a kind of chronic, low-level depression that a lot of people come to accept normally. Accepting that life have their own disappointments an unsatisfactory job, ungrateful children, an emotionally detached partner, demanding parents, or whatever and dealing with or around them is important for creating a satisfactory life. Therefore changing what can be changed and accepting what can't. We must do what we can to influence a difficult situation, but if in the long run little changes, then we must either learn how to accept what is making the best of it, or leave your situation. Too many people resort to food to salve emotions as opposed to acting according to their core values e.g., making healthy choices, contributing appropriately to a happier family life, working toward financial stability, and being guided by other overarching life values.
Emotional eating behaviors will surely have roots in childhood. Each time a parent has problems with a child's eating or weight, that parent may set limits on eating or criticize the newborn's behavior. This often leads to the child's sneaking food and lying about eating. This challenge can carry into adulthood, specially when weight continues to be a worry. Wanting to avoid criticism or perhaps any discussion of weight, the now-adult child will probably continue to lie as well as to get angry with or resent parents or another adults who disapprove. Past experience with a parent playing food policeman can create an unhealthy psychological situation from which emotional eating often results. Many individuals in this situation talk of experiencing an internal rebel that rejects any tries to set limits on his or her eating, even self-imposed limits. The emotional connection between past humiliation and also the need for more adaptive behavior with the current economic is the challenge to become met in such cases.
Alternatively, the individual that is sensitive about her weight could become a people-pleaser in the hope of winning the approval and passion for others who she hopes won't notice her weight. She cares for other people and disregards her very own needs, thereby gaining the satisfaction in daily life she craves. When she feels lonely, she eats; when she gets unappreciated, she resorts to food to meet the increasing demand.
Some people who have experienced a diet disorder such as anorexia or bulimia of their youth may find themselves being affected by overeating later in life. Most likely, their original difficulty with weight, shape, food, and body image were never adequately resolved regardless of whether their original disorder temporarily abated. When stress or some crisis in their current life occurs, they either fall back into old habits (e.g., restricting, bingeing, and purging) or continue with the opposite path and overeat. In any case, food is being used to avoid the pains and unpleasantness that life presents.
Or, someone that was an athlete earlier in her life may find herself or himself in the future with a weight problem. What worked during the past to maintain weight don't works. While the athlete probably didn't have to think much about managing weight or maybe did more exercise or reduce calories when they needed to make weight, anybody now finds it harder to stay at a healthy weight. If the eater engages in compulsive eating, he or she further defeats obtaining a solution. It is necessary for such people to redefine their relationship with food and use (e.g., this is exactly what I usually eat, itrrrs this that I rarely eat, this is what I do in terms of exercising). Later chapters emphasize this need.
Other psychological factors that can produce emotional eating include that the person thinks about food and eating. You might make excuses and rationalizations to provide himself or herself permission to eat in unhealthy ways (It's been such a stressful day; I deserve a reward or Well I've blown it, so why wouldn't you keep eating?). When you have difficulties being assertive, you could possibly resort to food to stuff down painful feelings. Thinking of yourself as someone who can't resist food or that has a sweet tooth makes it harder to incorporate adjustments to lifestyle that are required for weight management success. I am a chocoholic is a self-definition sure to allow it to be harder to resist temptation. To get over emotional eating and succeed in making a lifestyle change that leads to a healthy weight, you must redefine whom you are and how you act with regards to food and exercise.
