Emotional eating – when food is your therapy

The starving for love, acceptance, attention and positive emotions soul often settles in the stomach, dooming us to a drug addiction to food. It is called emotional eating and it happens when you delegate to food exceptional rights. The rights to fill an emotional gap, to suppress emotional pain, to fight stress or boredom.

It starts in our childhood

In each emotional moment we invite the food in our souls, not in our stomach. Do you remember when you were little a situation where you fell and hurt yourself and your mom would buy you a chocolate, so that the pain goes faster. Since early childhood we think about rich in calories foods, like chocolate, chips and other treats as a reward or a sort of a pain healer. Normal meals are boring, you get them every day and you don’t have to do anything special to have them. May be this is the reason you would see a child in a supermarket crying for chocolate and never for an apple.

From early childhood we are tought that chocolate is special and you can’t have it every day. Something like the forbidden fruit, and this makes it of course irresistable. You want to eat it now and as much as possible, because tommorrow it may not be there.

Grandmothers play here also an important role, encouraging their grandchildren to eat – so that they grow up big and strong. How more you eat, how better. And everytime you visit her, she’s prepared with food enough to feed all the neighbourhood. All your favourite meals are of course in the menu – and you have to eat everything from the big and overfilled plate that has been served to you. She would give you a sweet treat as well. An interesting fact is that children often love the meals of their grandmothers more than these of their mothers. And the meals of grandma are very often not healthy at all. They are also often served as a prize – a kind of food reward. Just because you are the most beautiful and fantastic child in the world – you deserve all your food wishes to be satisfied.

Drama gives emotional eating power

If you like the drama – in your personal life or in movies, then you might be making emotional eating stronger than you. In every drama movie you see how at some point things go wrong between the main characters and very often, if a couple breaks up, the woman locks herself in a room and starts eating as much as possible and as unhealthy as possible. She’s desperate – the love of her life has just left her and she needs to drown her emotions in chocolate. Having a similar situation in real life, this is often the first thing coming to your mind, too. Some sort of a safe boat, which you know won’t save you, but you step in it anyways. This is your temporary escape from the situation.

Once fallen in the hole of the emotional eating it is not very easy to get out of there, because things get worse. If before you were only single, after trying to heal your depression with food, now you are also more fat. Your clothes are getting tighter and this brings you back in that hole again. It looks like a cycle without end.

What can help you stop the emotional eating?

It is not so difficult to stop your food addiction as you might think. As soon as you see the first results, you’ll feel better and stronger.

There’s one thing, that can help you in such situation and it is – take care of yourself. Spend some time on making  yourself more beautiful. Change your hair color or your hairstyle, put makeup every day, buy yourself expensive makeup or body care, go to a beauty treatment. This is actually another alternative, which doesn’t make you fall deeper in depression, but helps you to stand back on your feet.

Others will undoubtedly see the change and you’ll start receiving many compliments from the people around you. This will encourage you and send your confidence and trust in yourself in a different dimension. As they say – “Beauty will save the world!”