Emotional Eating: From Slavery to Freedom
How do our emotions relate to and influence our dietary choices? How does the food we eat change our mood?
Emotional eating is a hot topic right now, probably because after trying all the possible diets, going from one extreme to another, from paleo to vegan, what we have found is that nutrition is one part of the picture, but the other part is our feelings and their impact on quantity and quality of what we eat. How can emotions be separated from dietary choices? There are four steps to this:
1. Are we emotional eaters? Awareness has a huge impact, it is important that we distinguish between eating out of hunger, and emotional eating. Emotional eating happens quickly: something occurs that evokes an emotion in us (it could be something at work, certain behaviour by another person, anything at all...) and immediately afterwards we feel the urge to eat.
2. Developing alternatives to extricate ourselves from the situation. As soon as you understand that your urge to eat right now is not related to hunger but is related to certain emotions, you should take a step back, and think of an alternative to food. It could be going for a walk to clear your head for ten minutes, calling a friend, writing in your diary, doing sports, doing anything else that will distract you. It takes the brain on average 15 minutes to readjust, so if you can distance yourself from the situation even just for quarter of an hour your brain can recalculate.
3. Looking at the deeper implications of dietary choices. First of all, the basic tendency of most of us is to ask ourselves questions before, and not after. Two minutes before eating it, we think "how much do I want this chocolate now?", instead of asking ourselves thirty minutes after we have finished eating it, "Did it make me feel better?"
4. Balancing blood sugar levels: As we make our diet healthier, blood sugar levels stabilise. Studies have found that among people with stable blood sugar levels, the tendency to have food cravings is just 15%, but when blood sugar levels are unstable, this percentage rises to 65%. So maintaining stable sugar levels may prevent food cravings ... in short, the chicken and the egg in the best way possible: eat well, feel better, feel better, eat better!
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Maya x