Sandy is an HR professional working with a reputed MNC. Recently, her boss had piled a lot of work on her and gave her an impossible deadline. This has thrown her off her balance. She gets so jittery and feels that she needs to eat a lot. Though she eats a lot, she feels so guilty after eating so much. She has also started putting in a lot of weight and she finds that is pulling herself to work. She finds herself getting worked up and she will finish an entire packet of chips in one sitting. Do you think Sandy is an emotional eater?
As much as it sounds unrealistic there is a lot of connection between food and emotions. Emotional eating is a behaviour that the individual engages in when there is some stress or struggle that might affect the individual pretty bad.
There may be a question as to why food? Why not anything else? When an individual is upset and there is a presence of negative emotions this can lead to a feeling of emptiness. “Nothing to look forward to”, this can bring in a feeling of emptiness or emotional vacuum. One of the ways that people use to fill void is to fill it with food.
Interestingly, food creates a feeling of fullness. The feeling of being filled against a feeling of vacuum. This feeling of course is temporary and is a falsified feeling which brings in an emotion of feeling full emotionally as a person. Now, one of the most important things to remember in this is that emotional eating affects men and women alike.
Emotional eating can be caused due to a number of reasons. Some of those reasons are stress, hormonal imbalance or changes, hunger cues that are distorted.
Emotional eating is about using food as a medium to make oneself feel good. Food is seen as a way to fill the emotional needs of the person. But the sad truth is that, food cannot fix this need. In fact, after this indulgence, one feels worse about themselves than they did before they indulged in emotional eating. The emotional problem remains and then to add to that there is this guilt that comes from over eating.
Some aspects to remind oneself is emotional hunger comes quickly. It is not that this is planned or thought off earlier. This hits you suddenly like an overwhelming feeling. Physical hunger, however, comes when there is a natural turn of events.
Emotional hunger comes with particular foods. When the hunger is high, and if there are smells of food coming in, there will immediately be a surge of hunger pangs. When this happens there will be a mindless eating. The individual will finish a packet of chips and won’t even know it.
Emotional eating often leads to regret, guilt, or shame. It results in a blame game as well. An individual feels guilty after they eat because the reason, they eat is emotional in nature.
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