We live in a culture in which food is inextricably linked to emotion and situation. We eat because we are bored, because we are sad, because we are happy. When we want to celebrate, we go out to eat. When we are grieving a romantic breakup, we drown our feelings in ice cream. When someone gets sick or someone dies, food becomes the way we show our pain and support: large amounts of stews and cakes and salads.
I’m not saying this is all bad. While food has inherent limitations in meeting our emotional needs, an emotional connection to food is part of a normal, healthy relationship with food. Food can and should bring us pleasure and comfort. Just think of the associations that certain foods and aromas cause in you: the feeling of “home” you feel when you smell cinnamon and vanilla; the sense of security a meatloaf and mashed potato dinner can bring; the nostalgic feeling you get when your sister makes your grandmother’s famous broccoli casserole for Thanksgiving. On rainy Sundays, a cup of hot cocoa is a wonderful accompaniment to reading the newspaper, while the ritual of a celebratory cake adds meaning to birthdays.
But many of us have come to see food as a blanket for our emotions, lulling them to sleep when we turn to food to provide the love and comfort we crave. Food is reward, friend, love, and support. We eat not because we are hungry, but because we are sad, guilty, bored, frustrated, lonely, or angry. By doing so, we ignore those internal hunger and satiety signals. And since there is no way that food can really address our emotions, we eat and eat and eat, but we never feel satisfied.
Unfortunately, at this point most of us get stuck. We recognize the short-term comfort or pleasure we get from food, and without other skills to care for ourselves, we come to depend on it for an instant solution that will make us feel better. Then we get stuck in a downward spiral: eating to feel better doesn’t help us feel better in the long run; Instead, it adds guilt and anger over our eating habits and their ramifications on our weight. In fact, studies show that while you can receive immediate emotional comfort from eating, the associated guilt dominates any emotional support you receive.
What very few of us understand is that food doesn’t fix feelings. It can comfort us in the short term or distract us from our pain, but in the long term it only makes our problems worse and prevents us from making substantial changes that could lead to greater satisfaction and a healthier life.
What this means is that if you are emotionally driven to eat, you don’t have an eating problem. No. You have a care problem. You are not taking proper care of yourself. I know this to be true because I was once an emotional eater. I ate because there was something I wanted, but that something was not food. Eating kept me from feeling lonely, helped me get through tough times, and unlike people, it was always there for me.
But then my obsession with weight arose. And suddenly the food stopped working. Instead of long-term comfort, you’d get a short-term fix followed by more intense and lasting guilt. The more weight I gained, the more evidence I saw of my failures. The more I felt like a failure, the more I ate. And so on and so on.
Where did all this thinking come from? Because of the way we were raised.
I remember shortly after my son was born. When he was hungry, he cried. He suckled until he was full, then fell asleep, satiated. Only when her stomach emptied again, usually within a couple of hours, did she cry again for food. He was in perfect contact with his hunger / satiety signals.
But as he got older and switched to solid food, things changed. Not in how he approached food, but in how we (well, my mother, for example) taught him to see food. I remember once when Isaac was one year old and my mother was giving him strained carrots. He happily ate a few spoonfuls and then stopped opening his mouth. The message was clear: “No more!”
But my mom ignored the message. “Come on, Isaac,” he crooned, “just a few more bites.” She held the spoon tantalizingly in front of her mouth. When that didn’t work, she pushed it against her lips. I’m still out of luck. So she got more creative. “Here comes the plane, to the hangar,” he said, playfully waving his fork near his mouth, trying to cash in on his fascination with airplanes. “Open the hangar, Isaac.”
I didn’t want any of that. Isaac was full and no longer interested in food. He was a smart kid and knew what he needed. My mom was essentially telling him that he was not a reliable judge, that she, not he, knew how to manage his food intake. It was then that I understood where it all started for me!
But I don’t blame my mom. My mother wasn’t trying to do this on purpose; he was simply unconsciously transmitting food attitudes rooted in our culture. If Isaac (and I) didn’t get them from her, we would certainly get them from somewhere else.
Our culture teaches us that there are appropriate times and places for food that, in most cases, have nothing to do with the feeling of hunger and satiety within our body. Think about the messages we get: “I went to so much trouble cooking and you’re not even going to eat.” “You can’t be hungry. You just had dinner!” “It is not time to eat”. “Clean your plate, children are starving in India.” “Do you have an A? Let’s bake some cookies to celebrate.” “Poor thing, did you fall off your bike? Will ice cream help you make it better?”
These external signals, then, dictate our diet for much of our life. As a result, we stop listening to our internal signals about hunger and satiety. Instead, we eat because we think we should; to fill in feelings we don’t want to have; to mark important moments in our lives; To fill a void that we can’t even clear
After years of turning to food for non-physical reasons, our ability to pick up on those internal signals has weakened, like the leg muscles in someone who is bedridden. Then when we realize that we are gaining weight, we try to impose our own will to eat less in excess of our appetite.
Scientists have a term for this. “Restricted eaters” are people who regulate their eating through external cues, often in an effort to control their weight. In contrast, “rampant eaters” are those who still rely on internal body signals to determine when and how much to eat.
Extensive research suggests that restricted eaters are much less sensitive to hunger and satiety than unrestricted eaters.25 In other words, it takes more food deprivation to make them hungry and larger amounts of food to feel full, compared with those who eat without restrictions. .
