The Cause Of Emotional Eating

• Eating food can change the way you feel.
• Most of the time you think you’re hungry, you’re not!
• Learn what real hunger feels like, so you can stop being an emotional eater.

One of the most common ways people distract themselves from their feelings, is by eating. This kind of distraction is known as emotional eating, and is one of the major causes of obesity in the developed world.

What Is Emotional Eating?

Emotional eating is a term used to describe someone who eats food in response to a particular feeling. For example, they may be feeling lonely, bored or sad and so turn to food as a means of changing the way they feel.

The danger of emotional eating, is that it can cause a person to eat food even when they are not hungry.

Over time as the person gets larger and larger their self esteem will likely suffer, as they will now have to face the reality and consequences of being obese.

Since the habit of emotional eating will now have been firmly established, an obese person will continue to eat more and more food in an attempt to distract themselves from the painful feelings their body is causing them. And so the cycle of emotional eating will continue.

Are You Really Hungry?

You don’t have to be obese to be an emotional eater. Many people for example eat food when they are bored, or when something upsetting happens to them.

These foods are known as “comfort foods” and in moderation they are o.k., but as soon as they become a regular habit you better be prepared to go out and get some larger sized clothes!

However comfort foods don’t have to make you obese, as once you are able to differentiate between real physical hunger and emotional hunger, you will find it a lot easier to control when you eat and what you eat.

Signs Of Real Hunger

Real hunger causes physical discomfort, and will fade away as soon as you eat something. It doesn’t matter what you eat, because real hunger is satisfied by any type of food, even junk food!

The physical discomfort that real hunger causes you is felt in the stomach, which is located roughly where the bottom of your sternum is.

The sternum is the bony middle part of your chest (see picture). When you feel hunger in this area, that is a sign that your body is actually hungry and requires food.

Signs Of Emotional Eating

A lot of people don’t know where their stomach is located, and if you ask them to point where they are feeling hungry they will usually point to their belly button. This is not your stomach, it is your gut, your small intestines!

When you feel physical discomfort in your gut and have a “gut reaction” this is not real hunger, but a physical response to an emotion.

You will know when you are eating emotionally, because unlike real hunger, emotional eating does not give you a full and satisfying feeling.

This is why sometimes you can go around the house eating all sorts of different foods, but never really feeling like you have eaten enough.

This then causes you to eat more and more food, until eventually you get to a point where you start to feel sick.

Of course the reason why you were never able to feel satisfied with all the food you ate, is because you weren’t actually experiencing real hunger.

Rather you were experiencing an emotion that needed to be addressed. But since you were distracting yourself from that emotion with food, you could not address that need. So no matter how much food you ate, you never felt satisfied.

For example, if you are feeling bored you might choose to snack on some junk food. Whilst this may make you feel better for awhile, as soon as the food is gone you start to feel bored again and so you get some more food.

Before you know it, you have stuffed your face with loads of chocolate and wished you hadn’t eaten so much.

I’m sure many people can relate to this example, or something similar to it, because as I said in the very first article, most people do not listen to the messages their feelings are trying to tell them.

So the next time you think you are feeling hunger, have a quick check to see where it is coming from. If you feel hungry in your stomach, eat, if you feel hungry in your gut, don’t!

Stop Yourself From Being An Emotional Eater

By learning to identify real hunger from emotional hunger, you can prevent yourself from over eating and take appropriate action to address the need your body was trying to bring your attention to.

Although i have used food in this article to demonstrate how people can distract themselves from their feelings, it is important to understand that there are many different types of distracters people can use.

Some obvious distracters include drugs and alcohol, although TV, video games and entertainment are all commonly used as distracters.

All of these distracters have one thing in common: they are used as a means of distracting yourself from the way you feel.

Although this may result in some short term pleasure, they invariably result in long term pain as your needs, wants and desires will remain unfulfilled.

The only real way to satisfy your needs is to listen to your feelings and respond appropriately to them.