Archive | December 2009

Emotional Eating When Stress is High

Dec8

There are all kinds of stress, and everyone experiences some stress every day. However, there are certain kinds of stress that can send an emotional eater or a food addict over the edge.

One of those stressors is missing meals, not skipping meals but missing meals. The body needs nourishment at certain intervals. This varies from one person to another because everyone’s body is different.

Hormone levels are different, metabolism is different, and food requirements are different. People feel hungry at different times. Men’s bodies and metabolism are different from women’s.

One thing is constant, the need to eat when your body calls for food. The perfect time to eat is when you first feel the hunger pangs.

Where emotional eating and food addiction are concerned, the importance of eating when you are hungry is critical. If you miss your chance to eat because the meeting  or phone call lasted too long, or you couldn’t get out of some stupid conversation, you’re in for trouble.

Your body will give you a 15 to 30-minute pass and when that’s gone, panic sets in. If the body engaged in self-talk perhaps it would ask, “Am I going to get anything to eat? I’m hungry. How will I survive? Did they forget about me?”

And then the talkback. “Oh, I have an idea. Let’s store some fat just in case they never feed me again. Yeah, that’s the ticket, we’ll pack it on the gut and thighs and rear”.

Then, by the time you do eat,  you feel like you’re starving and your hormones are going nuts, so you eat but the hunger isn’t satisfied, so you keep eating and overeating. Eventually, your blood sugar balances out and you don’t feel hungry any more.

Instead, you feel stuffed and bloated, and very uncomfortable. If this pattern is repeated often enough, you will lose touch with your body’s nutritional needs and eat just to be eating.

It is precisely at times like these that we eat fatty fried foods, cheeses, breads, and high-sugar desserts and snacks. The resulting discomfort is stressful, and the tendency toward emotional eating is greater.

The best remedy in this case is to eat when you’re hungry. Take some food with you so you’ll be prepared. An apple with peanut butter, a tuna fish, turkey, chicken or egg salad sandwich with some pickle and lettuce works well and tastes great.

With so many other things to stress us out, this is one thing that can make it all better. And just wait until you see how much more energy you have.

Be Bigger Than Your Food Addiction

Dec3

You know that expression, “You have too much on your plate”? Well, did you ever notice that when you have too much on your plate, you tend to put too much on your plate?

This is one of the big challenges for people with food addictions. Overwhelming stress, or the illusion of overwhelming stress, makes us eat for no other reason than we don’t know what else to do.

Stress has a way of making us think things are worse than they actually are. When we react by overeating, the stress gets worse because first, it doesn’t solve the problem and second it adds a second problem of becoming overweight.

Oddly enough, it seems like the larger your body gets the more invisible we become. People don’t notice us in positive ways and the fat is easy to hide behind. The truth is that we are only hiding from ourselves.

Things that happened in the past are in the past. They can’t be changed. Now is different. Anything can happen in the present moment, which is the only moment we have control over anyway.

If something in the past made you feel small and insignificant, then why not change things? We are responsible for making our own changes, no matter what, so why not be bigger than our food addiction?

I was thinking about this after I had been to a Seal concert. Seal is a great performer but I noticed something in this particular concert that I’d not noticed before. Throughout every song, his arms were outstretched most of the time.

As he sang with his arms wide, it gave me a sense of freedom, of being larger than life. As we left the concert, my friend and I serenaded each other with our favorite songs, none of when even vaguely resembled Seal’s performance.

As we sang and laughed, we stretched out our arms wide and spun around like children. It was a fabulous moment. In that moment, we were as big as the world with no worries, no troubles, no thought of food.

It was like being in a different world, one in which we were noticed and admired. Some people even applauded.

It didn’t matter what we did, or how we were dressed or whether or not we could sing worth a hoot. We were being our true selves in the best of ways. What a blast!

You are bigger than anything that will ever happen to you. Stretch out your arms as wide as the sky and spin around. Just for a moment, be your own true self. It’s positively addictive.

Obesity Levels Rising

Dec1

Even though not every food addict or emotional eater is obese, these CDC statistics give an idea of how obesity levels have soared throughout the country in the last 20 years. I can’t help but wonder if stress levels have increased proportionately.

This YouTube video has some startling information about obesity in the United States and some great common sense tips on how to deal with it.

Although calorie counting is not the only consideration for food addicts who want to lose weight and heal their food addiction, simplicity seems to work for everyone.