The danger of food as comfort : how to escape emotional eating. (psychology)
95% of all diets fail (Freedhoff, 2014).
Marketing, pharmaceutical companies, and social media know this, yet they still are selling magic pill remedies.
The pain of being overweight or obese runs so deep that people are even willing to undergo injections, treatments, or surgeries with numerous dangerous side effects.
The thing is that … being overweight or obese isn’t a disease that you can catch. It’s a manifestation.
As your body is the physical display of your mind.
If you’re suffering from being overweight, it’s because you’re out of balance. Your responsibilities, job, struggles, emotions … have taken over your health and fitness.
Diets fail, no matter their nature, because they are just temporary fixes to a lasting problem lying beneath the surface.
You’ve most likely experienced it, you hop on a diet, you restrict yourself heavily, you start to loose the weight.
However at the same time you build up frustration and then when you can’t handle the mental friction anymore,
the craving intensifies and you end up indulging and breaking the diet.
But you don’t have to take drugs, starve yourself, or do 4 hours of cardio per day to lose the weight.
What you need to do is start by understanding your food patterns in order to then, be able to rebalance your lifestyle in a sustainable way.
The danger of food as comfort
Food is not a reward. When you treat food as a reward, it becomes a source of cheap dopamine.
If food becomes your source of cheap dopamine, you’ll turn to it every time you need to ease discomfort.
Do this too much, and you’ll rewire your neural connections. Your brain will start associating food as the go-to solution when you’re overwhelmed, sad, angry, or experiencing any emotional distress.
It becomes your emotional way out.
High-palatable foods trigger the release of a lot of dopamine, a neurotransmitter you’ve likely heard of.
This activates the same pathways in your brain as drugs do, which is why food addiction is real.
Through repetition of a specific mechanism, a sequence, you’ve taught your brain that food is the solution to stress, to emotional overload.
There has been a linkage in your brain between a trigger and indulging in food. Your whole body has learned that response, now it feels almost impossible for it to wear off.
Your hormone levels, neural connections, and dopaminergic system have all adjusted to this behavior, making it a normal part of your functioning.
Because you see, none of these systems have been designed for modern life and modern food.
Your brain wasn't built on the fact that you have access to unlimited calories for a couple of dollars by simply walking into a grocery store.
Think about it: thousands of years ago, people had to risk their lives and hunt to have access to the same type of food you’re just picking up off the shelf.
Your brain hasn’t evolved much since then, it’s certainly not adapted to modern food.
More than that, processed foods are designed to make you crave them. Think about this for a second …
Companies spend millions of dollars to get you addicted to their products. To me, that’s a strong enough reason not to buy them.
Your brain is not built for this easy palatable caloric access, and that’s what got you trapped in the first place.
In fact, this may not even be your fault. If you’ve been overweight since childhood, it’s likely influenced by parental food behaviors.
Your parents make the food choices and teach you food habits when you’re young. If they have dysfunctional food patterns, you’ve picked up and copied them.
The problem isn’t just that you’re eating too much chocolate or snacking excessively.
Your relationship with food itself is inadequate. This is visible on multiple levels: your food choices, your metabolism, your thoughts, your emotional response, etc.
You’ve internalized that food is a way to cope with life’s stressors, it’s an insidious game.
Because food is a necessary need, not a cheap dopamine distributor. Don’t worry though we’re going to shed the light on this process.
It’s not just about food, your whole lifestyle needs to shift
Your food habits are just the tip of the iceberg - what’s underneath is more important if you truly want to understand what led you to being overweight.
27% of adults say they eat to manage stress (apa.org)
Stress is the most important factor when it comes to eating dysregulation.
But first, I need to start off by saying that stress is a normal part of life. When it’s short term and manageable it’s even beneficial for performance and activation.
(I dedicated a whole article on it that you can access here)
That being said, long-term and constant exposure to stress is highly detrimental. The physical and emotional pressure it puts on your body will lead you to seek temporary comfort.
This is when your body, consciously and unconsciously, turns to food—particularly highly palatable food (oftentimes very high in calories)
Your body is stressed, your minds seeks for an escape and this triggers cravings, food thoughts, impulses, binging episodes.
Sleep is another huge factor. In order to effectively regulate your metabolism and hormones, your body requires sleep.
It’s essentially a state of body inactivation, the only time when your body can repair damage and heal itself, this is the foundation of your health.
Your hunger hormones are regulated through sleep too. If you don’t get quality sleep for a sufficient period, you will be out of balance.
Your hunger will not be reset.
More than that, sleep is also critical in regulating your emotional brain. During sleep, you sort everything out.
Your mind unwinds and processes all the emotional storage you’ve accumulated during that day.
This is key to being emotionally stable, you have to give your brain time to empty itself and filter the emotional information so that it can make sense of it.
If you don’t get sufficient and quality sleep, your hormones will be out of place, you will be more prone to stress, your negative emotions will amplify …
You’ll basically set the context that leads to seeking your emotional way out through calorie-dense and savoury food.
Don’t get fixated on the food part, It’s not just food, food is a behavior, a manifestation.
You have to understand that this is a whole mechanism, it’s your lifestyle that’s out of balance and that’s the precise reason why dieting doesn’t work.
Dieting is restrictive and only a quick fix to a problem that’s much deeper than the overconsumption of calories.
Dieting fixes the behavior but not the inner reaction.
What you need is durability. Forget about anything that cannot be sustainable in the long run.
Also, if you manage to lose the weight and realize afterward that you have no idea how to stay lean, you’ll dive back into old unhealthy patterns.
You’ll feel completely lost and think staying lean is not achievable in the long term. It takes too much effort and feels counterfeit.
What you need is a complete approach that addresses the real problem to its root cause
At the end of the day, the real problem isn’t that fast food exists or that marketing companies understand your pain.
The real issue lies in the fact that your relationship with food is dysfunctional, likely because your lifestyle is out of balance and you have a hard time regulating your emotions.
Remember, when it comes to weight management, if it’s not sustainable, it doesn’t matter.
Your food response has been programmed.
The first thing we need to talk about is the trigger. Your food response is dictated by specific cues.
The appropriated trigger for eating is physical hunger.
Now hunger takes different form and you have to be able to make the different the distinction. This is key.
Hunger can be divided into three categories:
physical hunger (felt through the body),
external hunger (triggered by your environment),
emotional hunger (a coping mechanism).
In theory, Physical hunger is the only type that should trigger the eating response.
If your eating habits are provoked by other cues, it will lead you to overeating or emotional eating as those triggers are way more present in your day to day life. (as we just saw that stress plays a huge role)
The manifestations of physical hunger are mainly physiological and can include stomach growling, feeling an empty stomach, dizziness, lack of concentration …
These symptoms can differ between individuals, but physical hunger should be the primary out of the three leading you to consume food.
Basically, eating food whenever your body is asking for it because you need energy.
Now, external hunger is not triggered by the body but by external cues, such as food ads, the smell of food in the street, or grocery shopping.
That’s where food companies are making their money.
Now, The last element is emotional eating, which is likely your biggest issue if you're reading this article. So let’s dive into it.
The triangle of emotional eating (Adaptation of the Cognitive Behavioral Theory)
In this case, the trigger is most likely an emotion, feeling or a mood.
For example, stress triggers an emotion of stress in your body, a feeling of overwhelm in your mind and an overall anxious mood.
This emotional distress induces a general feeling of imbalance and discomfort.
This trigger leads to food thoughts and cravings as your brain is trying to cope with it and uses the response that has been programmed in your mind.
Stress is the most common trigger but, but grief, frustration, anger, shame and other negative emotions can also provoke dysfunctional food use.
You see, if there is one thing that your mind hates, it’s to be out of balance. So it seeks the quickest fix: dopamine.
Essentially, it tries to fight the pain induced by imbalance through pleasure seeking.
However when the pleasure seeking activity is nonadaptive (and here the response is overeating, so pretty non-beneficial), this response isn’t sustainable.
This negative state triggers intrusive food thoughts as your brain tries to correct the problem.
The pleasure seeking manifests in your head in the form of thoughts. It feels uncontrollable, as food thoughts pop into your head, leading to strong cravings, visualization of specific food.
Finally, this breaches the thoughts and lead to a decision, after giving attention and reinforcing these thoughts, you accept and you make a decision.
That’s when it turns into behavior. This is when you start snacking, eating, or buying the food you crave, whatever it is.
The biggest problem is that this reaction takes place on both a conscious and an unconscious level.
If unconscious, you might automatically put your hand into a bag of snacks, only to realize it's empty. You don’t remember opening it, never mind eating the entire box.
But it’s also conscious, when for example, you told yourself you’d stop snacking just to tell yourself two hours later that ‘‘a single cookie can’t hurt that bad’’
The solution is to cultivate two skills: awareness and self-control. These two skills are your escape for overcoming robotic food use that is tainting your life …
How to get reprogram your mindset to rebalance your weight.
1. Forget about quick fixes
Free yourself from the allure of magic pill solutions. Sustainable weight loss requires a long-term approach it isn’t something that clicks, it’s a progressive adaptation of your lifestyle.
Don't get caught up in fad diets, online magic remedies, or social media nutrition gurus.
Follow what has worked for millennia : a diversified and balanced diet based on whole foods.
2. Identify the triggers
Become aware of your unhealthy food patterns and more importantly on their triggers.
Avoiding to confront yourself will only make it harder as you’ll keep reinforcing these behaviors over and over again.
When it comes to emotional eating, understand the emotional reaction and explore it without judging it
Document your triggers and reactions. I recommend using a Journal that you keep with you during the day. Treat this journal as a database to study your eating behaviors closely.
3. Understand the reaction
In the case of emotional eating understand this sequence.
Trigger → Emotion → Thoughts → Decision → Behavior (emotional eating).
Your goal is to be able to retrace every step and to become aware that this is a process and not a fatality.
Know how it works and you’ll be able to influence the course of it. This awareness foundation will stick with you for the rest of your life.
The good thing is that, once you’re aware of it, you can’t unlearn it.
4. Start building self-control
Funny thing is that weight loss is way more about the mind that it is about the body.
Your body is just the result of the mental decisions that you make.
Once you have the awareness, the only thing that is left is to practice self-control.
Basically building the mental resistance necessary to not make the decision not to act when the emotional eating reaction chain is triggered.
This is a skill that you have to practice, to cultivate, don’t expect it to be instantaneous or you’ll end up resigning yourself, thinking that you don't 'have it'.
5. Don’t expect it to be easy
Self-expectations have the power to sabotage your progress. You have to integrate that weight loss is based on consistent and daily efforts. It’s a gradual process
Don’t expect, have a goal and work on it everyday. Focus on what you can control.
Your weight on the scale is the result of your choices. Why focus on the end result when you can pour your energy in the controllable steps that will lead you there ?
As always, I hope this helps. Trust the process …
Gab,
References :Stress and eating behaviors - Y.Yau et al.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4214609/The psychology of weight loss - M. Davidhttps://psychologyofeating.com/psychology-weight-loss/Schema therapy - J. Younghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmcKu90qcQ8&ab_channel=PsychotherapyExpertTalksThe Role of Psychological Well-Being in Weight Losshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8606336/The psychology of weight gain : L.Hillhttps://www.froedtert.com/sites/default/files/upload/docs/health-resources/virtual-events/psychology-of-weight-gain051514.pdfBehavioral and Psychological Factors Affecting Weight Loss Success - K.Pigsborg et al.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37335395/Eating Too Fast? Here Are 4 Ways To Slow Downhttps://health.clevelandclinic.org/why-do-i-eat-so-fastStress and eatinghttps://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2013/eating#:~:text=Twenty-seven percent of adults,a meal due to stress.[The Link Between Obesity and Sleep - Sleep FoundationSleep Foundationhttps://www.sleepfoundation.org › ... › Obesity and Sleep](https://www.sleepfoundation.org/physical-health/obesity-and-sleep#:~:text=Sleep loss creates a hormone,creates increased feelings of hunger.)Jeff nippard - How to get leanhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roHQ3F7d9YQ&t=25s&ab_channel=JeffNippard