Are we emotionally what we eat?

Being a mother is a lot of stress; unfortunately it is a common practice that we tend to cure that by eating. I am one of those people who has let go to emotional year after year; I am almost 20 kilos overweight. Whenever I try to lose weight I go back to that emotional eating habit the moment I am faced with a stressful situation. Many times it happens that as soon as we feel upset, we go to the fridge and grab a piece of chocolate or feel like eating an ice cream. The way we seem to correlate between sadness, depression and eating is a common practice. Not only do we think about eating but also tend to be more attracted to sweets and comfort foods which it works out temporarily.

To find out that this is not an individual case but rather something that has clear biological and psychological reason, I did a lot of research. It is very essential that one knows and understands the mechanism of emotional eating in order to be able to fight it. With this post I intend to help myself and you to overcome this horrible habit. Emotional eating is a vicious cycle, you feel depressed, you eat, and you gain weight and consequently feel more depressed and so on. Emotional eating is defined to be “the practice of eating large quantities of comfort food (junk food) in response to feelings instead of hunger”.

It is a chosen drug for escaping from all our bad situations and tension. This is not a mere illusion; it has its biological rationale behind it. It is due to the fact that when one eats, the chemicals we gain from food not only affect the appetite but also our brains so the connection between food and mood becomes a bit complex and hard to separate. When we eat, hormones like serotonin, endorphins and dopamine are affected. These are the very same chemicals which affect the mood. They are even sometimes put into anti-depressant medicines.

Emotional eating is not a serious illness; it is a normal common experience in our lives and becomes serious only when we let go to it. Since I am sure that no one would want to have eating as her only resolution or ultimate problem solver. I collected some tips for us and will try to share more in the future =)

1- Hinder yourself from eating if you don’t feel that you are starving. Don’t listen to your body if you feel you just want to eat something. Hunger pain only stays for like 10 minutes.

2- You can always do things like net surfing, reading a book, calling a friend or even go out for a drink when you feel like eating.

3- Do sports and exercises on a regular basis. Not only is sporting healthy in itself; but it puts one in a good mood. Research proved that sporting helps release the happiness hormone in our bodies.