What if weight loss isn’t just about food? The way we deal with life is just as important (if not more so) than what we eat.
There is a strong link between what we eat and how we feel. Often, eating is how we cope with life, using it as a painkiller, an escape, or a punishment, so we need to look beyond food for answers. We don’t realize it, but when we’re feeling pain, fear, guilt, stress, anxiety, loneliness, boredom, or lack, we use food to make ourselves feel better.
Dozens of studies indicate that diets generally have a dismal success rate. A study in the British Medical Journal found that within one year, participants had regained all the weight they had lost. The diet is a band-aid, and the medicine is the psychology behind what we eat.
What Emotional Factors Make You Gain Weight?
An over eater is an overly sentimental person. All the feelings stuffed with excess food come to the surface, and without the right tools, it’s a circle of self-sabotage. If we want to lose weight and keep it off, we must develop healthier means of coping with life.
According to emotional eating expert Tricia Nelson, there are three key healthy ways of addressing emotions and stress that will help us:
1. Be aware of our emotions
Instead of focusing on what unhealthy foods are doing to us, start addressing what they are doing for us.
Take the PEP test:
| Food as a: | Driving emotion: |
| Painkiller | Pain |
| Escape | Fear |
| Punishment | Guilt |
When the cookie “starts calling my name,” we must ask ourselves, “What’s really going on?” “Am I trying to numb painful emotions, escape from something that is overwhelming, or punish myself?”
2. Reducing stress
“Over eaters” are “over doers” (and, in my opinion, they are often “over thinkers” too).
Stress plays a role in elevated cortisol levels, and cortisol increases appetite and causes our bodies to store fat instead of burning it because it is a good source of energy.
When we are stressed out, the brain does not distinguish the reason (whether it is real or mental). If our mind is filled with stressful thoughts, it will prevent us from making good decisions about what we eat. Furthermore, if our minds are full of thoughts and behaviors that cause us stress, our bodies will not be in the best position to burn fat and lose calories. The reason, it’s because they need fat to generate a “fight or flight” response to danger (even if the danger is only in our heads). Moreover, digestion (and, by extension, metabolism) is turned off, and the body’s ability to absorb nutrients drops by 40–60 percent. This is why we get nutritional deficiencies.
For the digestive system to absorb nutrients, it must be clean and healthy. We can’t take in nutrients if we are sick from a bad diet and a toxic environment.
“We are not what we eat, but what we absorb,” Odile Fernandez Martinez writes in her book My Anticancer Recipes.
Other negative effects of emotional stress include:
- Appetite hormones get out of whack (ghrelin indicating hunger, and leptin indicating satiety).
- The amount of thyroid hormone (which regulates the rate at which calories are burned, among other functions) and growth hormone (which controls body growth, among other functions) decreases.
- The intestinal flora is decreased (which ensures the proper functioning of our digestive system, among other functions).
Our body screams what the soul keeps quiet. Every health symptom has an emotional cause. We must ask ourselves, “What does this have to teach me?”
Self-care is a crucial piece of the weight-loss puzzle. When we take time for ourselves, we actually increase our capacity to give to others and are also better equipped to handle life’s challenges without turning to food. We must learn how to say no. An over eater is commonly a pleasant person who ends up burnt out and full of resentful feelings. Saying no reduces stress and, consequently, the feeling of hunger.
3. Get support from a community of other emotional eaters
Emotional eating is one of the hardest habits to break. Why? Because we need to eat!
Research shows that group support increases weight loss results. Nothing beats connecting with others who understand the shame and humiliation of behaviors like digging binge foods out of the garbage.
In summary, the three keys are as follows:
- Take the PEP test and ask yourself what’s going on when you find yourself making yet another trip to the kitchen. Is it, perhaps, a painkiller, escape, or punishment?
- Manage your stress by implementing self-care habits that can help you feel more centered and take a look at things like pleasing people.
- Nourish your soul through connection and community with other emotional eaters.
The Solution to Emotional Eating Is Not Dieting
Imagine losing the weight you want to lose and keeping it off. Many people do that diet yo-yo thing where they lose and gain the same weight over and over again. Experts say it’s incredibly unhealthy and make us feel guilty, upset, and frustrated. It’s like a perpetual failure, and it’s expensive too because we have to keep all those different sizes in our closets.
Harvard released a study in which they were trying to work out what the genetic component was for weight loss, and they didn’t find it. What they did find was that the issue was not the diet, but emotional eating.
According to Renée Jones in Lose Weight and Keep It Off: Emotional Eating, the following three simple steps, while having nothing to do with food, can have a real impact on our food choices and our ability to reach the weight that works best for us. After decades of struggling with emotional eating, she has overcome it, lost weight, and the best part, has not gained it back. She learned other ways to soothe herself, and since then, she has helped many women and a few men get a handle on their emotional eating. Let’s take a look.
1. Break the “diet yo-yo” mindset:
If we don’t believe it’s possible, it’s not likely to happen. When we break the “diet yo-yo” mindset, we start from a place where we believe it is possible. Do we have that idea within us? Let’s consider a few questions. What skills or talents have helped us succeed in other areas? How could we use them here? What is it that makes us think we can’t succeed? Do we want to succeed? And for some, is there a danger in succeeding? We have to tease out those subtle beliefs and agreements.
2. Recognize that a diet isn’t just for weight loss:
What we need to learn is training for what works for our body (types of food, types of preparation, how often we eat, serving sizes, etc.). We can learn new recipes and food combinations that actually keep us satisfied and don’t kick our cravings into high gear. We can learn to manage our meals and snacks when we are in a rush. Here’s a pro-tip for us: if hunger kicks up our emotional eating, it’s okay to carry a snack in the car for the drive home, so we would rather not eat all the food when we get there. We must learn what works for us as well as what would be sustainable for a lifetime.
3. Can we just talk about that emotional eating thing?
“I know what drives us to food,” says Renée: It’s easy, it’s available, it’s legal, and the effect is instantaneous. It just works, and it’s actually a physical response because when we eat food for comfort, it floods our brain with a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Dopamine controls the brain’s pleasure and reward centers, so when we eat something pleasurable, we get the dopamine rush, and we feel better for a little while.
The single most effective element of weight loss and maintenance is this mantra: “Face your stuff; don’t stuff your face.” We have to learn what is coming up for us, what we are trying to stuff down, and follow with a food chaser, so we could get to our best selves, and our best selves always make much better choices.
The source of emotional eating does not have to be a traumatic experience, though it could be. It could be an experience, a belief we picked up along the way, or a great memory.
What food do you go to for comfort? Take a minute to close your eyes and think about that food. Can you see it? Smell it? Almost taste it? Now consider: When did you first have that food? Who gave it to you? How did it comfort you? And then, in what other ways can you meet that need? You can open your eyes when you recognize what’s going on for you, then face your situation and make other choices to meet that need.
Let us remember that all abusive strategies for our bodies are doomed to fail in the long term because our bodies are not made to suffer. The problem is not in the body or in the food, but in our minds, in our inability to manage our emotions if we do not apply the appropriate principles.
In conclusion: we can lose weight and keep it off if we break that blinking diet yo-yo mindset. We can lose weight and keep it off if we learn from our experience and do what works for us. We can lose weight and keep it off if we recognize what drives us to food and face that. And yes, we can lose weight and keep it off.
If you want to know if you are an emotional eater or a food addict, you can take this quiz by Tricia: Are you an Emotional Eater or Food Addict? — Heal your Hunger
DISCLAIMER
This information is not presented by a medical practitioner and is for educational and informational purposes only. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you have read.
