Is Emotional Eating At The Core
Or Your Binge Eating Problem? 

 

Emotional eating can be one of the most difficult aspects of Binge Eating or other eating disorders for a sufferer to be able to overcome.

But it can be done, with the right knowledge and a little guidance.

When thinking about tackling the issue, we may worry about having to face painful feelings or memories.

Or otherwise there may simply be a sense of confusion as to when we are eating because we are genuinely hungry or in response to our emotions.

The reasons behind emotional eating will be different and individual for each and every one of us.

However, there are some common areas to such compulsive eating issues that are well worth learning about. So please take some time to look through the following pages and see if any of these may be relevant to you:

Eating compulsively can mean that we are not aware of WHY we feel so driven to eat. Getting back in touch with our bodies genuine physical hunger signals, and being able to tell when it is actually something else we are needing, is an important step in re-balancing our relationship to food.

Are there any situations, types of food, emotions, people or places that ‘trigger’ us to eat in a certain way? Learn to identify these ‘eating triggers’ and create your own alternative coping methods.

We may turn to food for comfort, as we are so out of touch with our true emotions and needs. Or because we are actually so frightened of facing our feelings that we swallow them back down with food.

Yet these emotions and feelings are still there inside us. So learning to identify them, experience them, handle them, and express them in more appropriate, self-caring ways - including learning to be more assertive – is important to recovery from emotional eating.

  • Thinking about what food actually MEANS to us and how it affects how we eat

What? How can food have a ‘meaning’? Well, once we start to think about it, the meanings are almost infinite and will be unique to each of us. For instance – when we were young – was food used to reward us? Or withheld as a punishment? Were we always told to finish everything on our plate? Such connections can still be playing out in our minds and in our eating habits!

  • Thinking about what being ‘FAT’ or ‘THIN’ might mean to us.

For instance, FAT might mean ‘motherliness’, ‘comfort’, ‘protection’…or hiding away from the world, not conforming to expectations, or showing the world “look what you’ve done to me”.

THIN could mean ‘vulnerable’, ‘scary’, and have the fear of bringing high expectations with it.
 
Such thoughts and issues include understanding the incredible pressures placed on us by our society and culture to conform to ideals of body shape and appearance…ideals that are almost always impossible to live up to!

  • Learning about the effects of stress and how to manage it more effectively

Once we are in a habit of emotional eating as a form of comfort, we can end up doing so in response to all types of stressful situations. And as we all know so well……very often life seems to be made up of nothing but stressful situations!

So, leaning about how our bodies respond to stress, and being able to develop better, self-caring ways of managing stress, are important steps in being able to move away from using food as our emotional ‘crutch’.

  • Recognising behaviour chains and learning about breaking the emotional eating habit (in other words, being able to stop one thing necessarily leading onto another…unless you want it to!)

This ties in with identifying ‘eating triggers’ mentioned above.

For example:
‘Kathy’ is picked upon by her boss at work (the ‘trigger’ situation)……
which makes her feel angry and upset……
which leads her to binge eating in secret in her coffee break……
which makes her feel ashamed and self disgust afterwards……
which makes her feel depressed and want to comfort eat again later on.
 
And these kinds of ‘behaviour chains’ can make emotional eating become an ingrained habit over the years.

  • The importance of positive SELF ESTEEM, and stopping that incessant negative self-judgement that so many of us seem to have inside of us.

Being able to recognise and challenge those automatic negative thoughts that go on inside our heads, such as – “I’m just too lazy” – “It’ll never work” – “I’m so stupid” is a really important skill to develop.

But we can’t stop there! The other side of the coin is learning to grow positively, helping our minds focus upon life-enhancing interests and activities and whatever it is that makes us feel GOOD!

  • Body image and developing self-acceptance.

If concerns about physical appearance or weight are issues for us, an important step can be learning to accept our bodies for what they are NOW (rather than waiting for some magical time in the future when we will be ‘slim’ and everything will then be all right).

There are useful exercises to help with this, to re-integrate our bodies back into our whole being. In this way, we view ourselves as a complete person, as opposed to ‘me’ against ‘the fat’ - or ‘me’ and ‘my fat as my protection’ against the ‘outside world’.

 

Learn how the WAY we eat and WHAT we eat can have a very direct impact upon our emotions at a bio-chemical level. So as well as looking at the emotional issues, it is important to work on improving our nutrition and eating regularly as well.

WOW! We could probably go on and on!

But take these sections one at a time and see how they might ‘resonate’ with you and your own unique situation and experience.

This is where talking things over with a trained counsellor or therapist can be so helpful - or by discussing things within a selfhelp group or similar support organisation.

Please see our TREATMENT pages for ideas as to where you might be able to get some further support.

So, by understanding some of these driving forces behind our emotional eating problems, we can then decide how to tackle them and look forward to moving on with our lives, free from binge eating or other eating disorders.


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