Food can't fill emotional hunger and eating doesn't cure sadness
We all eat to live to survive because if we stop eating, we will die. Hence to avoid this fate, we all eat good food & drink enough water. However, nowadays there has been a new prevalent fashion of ‘live to eat’ that’s getting rampant in society. This new concept has nothing to do with our biological survival. Those who indulge in this do it because of some other reason outside of simply staying alive. In short, eating to live is a biological understanding whereas, living to eat is a psychological, social, and emotional disorder that needs urgent attention because emotional and disordered eating can wreak havoc on our mental, emotional, and physical health if left unaddressed, and, not to mention, the massive amount of time and energy it takes up, leaving one much less able to focus on what matters in his/her life.
For most of us, emotional eating has become a habit of comfort – in other words, it’s a behaviour induced by certain cues like situations, feelings, people, commercials, etc. Scientific studies done over the years reveal that animals & people who were more stressed ended up eating more and getting fatter. In general, most of us consider emotional eating as food addiction, just like we consider shopping, gambling, and other behaviours as addictions. There is no doubt that these behaviours can sometimes seem to take on a life of their own and make you feel like you’re just going along for a scary ride. But are they all the same? Well! they do seem like addictions on the surface, and it may be handy to use the term as a metaphor. We need to understand the difference between emotional eating and other behaviours are compulsions, not addictions.
A compulsion is something you feel you have to do; an addiction is something you can’t live without. Emotional eating, therefore, is a psychological compulsion to do something that would otherwise cause emotional distress, not physical withdrawal. The force that drives the behaviour, is the need to counteract feeling controlled by certain external forces by acting out against those or other external forces.
Learning to recognize your emotional eating triggers is the first step to breaking free from food cravings and compulsive overeating, and changing the habits that have sabotaged our diets in the past. Using food from time to time as a reward, or to celebrate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But, when eating becomes our primary emotional coping mechanism & when our first impulse is to open the refrigerator whenever we get upset, angry, lonely, stressed, exhausted, or bored, we get stuck in an unhealthy cycle where the real feeling or problem is never addressed.
Emotional hunger can't be satisfied with food; it only temporarily masks underlying feelings. To break the cycle of overeating, address the emotions triggering the urge. Without effective emotional management, controlling eating habits becomes challenging. Recognize the power you have over cravings; delay satisfying them for a few minutes. Use this time to assess your emotions.
Psychologists who have examined patients with eating disorders found that those who were taught how to meditate had lower levels of relapse and more positive outcomes after release than those who received only conventional diet or nutrition treatments. Hence it would not be difficult to recognise the value of Meditation for the elimination of the habit of stress eating and introduce this theory and practice as a subject in Education so that the youth & children can be saved from this fatal disorder which is more prevalent among them. Remember! Calming the mind for a few minutes may provide the distance needed to make a reasonable and healthy decision about whether to eat a chocolate cake or go in for a meditation session.
(The writer is a spiritual educator & popular columnist, views are personal)