Eating sweets after a love story, devouring food in times of stress and exceeding sufficient amounts for our body are clear examples of emotional nutrition.
We believe that: being a normal person is always alert to food, that we should fear chocolate, convinced that if we could control “this fierce inner hunger”, we would achieve harmony. We then conclude that, on many occasions, eating becomes a metaphor for how we live and how we handle our emotions.
- In many cases.
- The food frenzy functions as a smokescreen that prevents us from seeing the real problem: the loss of emotional control by the need to fill the void in other areas of our lives.
Food can become a substitute for emotional balance. When do we realize our frustrations with binge eating or chocolate ice cream?This compulsion when it comes to eating is often emotionally desperate.
Diets don’t work because diet and weight are the symptoms, not the problem, let’s say focusing on weight is a way not to pay attention to why people overeating, this, of course, is reinforced by our society, which focuses on extra kilos and calories consumed.
We feel that losing weight and having a slender figure will result in the emotional release of the painful events that afflict us today. Geneen Roth, a specialist author, points out that being overweight is a symptom, and even if we manage to lose weight, if we do not address the underlying reasons, we will remain unhappy. Here is an excerpt from his book that illustrates this problem very well.
One person once attended one of my seminars after losing thirty-four pounds to the diet, stood in front of a hundred and fifty people and said in a trembling voice:
? I feel like I’ve been robbed: I’ve had the best of my dreams taken away, I really thought that when I lost weight my life would change, but what’s changed is the outside, the interior stays the same. still dead and my father beat me when I was little. I’m angry, I’m lonely and now I have no illusion of losing weight.
One way or another, concern for our bodies hides deeper concerns that fuel a vicious cycle of unresolved concerns and hinder our ability to grow and develop.
For some authors, the real problem with overweight and bingeing is that food becomes a substitute for love. As Geneen Roth says, “If we stop feeding this wounded child inside the lonely adult, we can nurture love and intimacy.
In this way we free ourselves from the pain of the past and focus on the present, only if we give ourselves a space of intimacy and love will we learn to appreciate food and stop using it as a substitute.
At certain times we believe that eating will save us from ourselves, from the hatred we feel and from the anguish of being who we are, it is a kind of magical thought that reinforces the vicious circle that haunts us.
When we eat unbalanced, we neglect ourselves and our present, as we said before, venting through food and gaining weight is just a symptom, every time we eat compulsively, we reinforce the belief that the only way to get what we want is through emotions. Nutrition.
Thus, every time we overeat for an emotional imbalance, we reinforce our problem and cause even greater uncontrollability. The need to eat screams louder and louder, thus concealing the true cause.
Emotional nutrition, overeating or nutritional imbalance, most of the time, serves as an imaginary support to keep the four walls of our emotional home standing.
Gaining and losing weight or always being on a diet is like being constantly on an emotional roller coaster. A person who uses food to stay drunk through chaos, emotional intensity, and drama. As we said earlier, compulsive eating reflects our emotional distress.