Emotional Eating

So many of us eat to calm ourselves down, to help us with emotional upheavals. We eat when we are bored, lonely or depressed. We eat when we are angry and don't know how to deal with it. We eat when we are sad or frightened.

• Do you look to the fridge to give you the answers to your problems or for something to do?
• Do you wander around the house wondering how to prevent yourself from pushing food into your mouth?
• Do you graze throughout the day?

We may eat to self soothe, to satisfy some unmet need or some turmoil inside that is the result of something that seems uncontrollable happening in our life. Eating fills a gap caused by loneliness, generally a deep unfulfilled loneliness that makes friends and family impotent to help. Somewhere in life you have abandoned the real self and now present a false self to the world.

• Do you spend most of your time worrying about your weight?
• Do you obsess about what you will eat at the next meal?
• Are you a yo-yo dieter?
• Do you battle with yourself on a daily basis about how you look, what you think you should look like and whether or not you look fat?
• Are you an emotional eater?
• Do you have low self esteem?
• Are you confident in some areas of your life and lacking in others?

An early experience with food holds the key to eating disorders or problems with food of any kind. As infants, we are dependant upon our carers to nurture, protect and feed us. However, within many families there lies a dysfunctional element which is not always obvious. It can be about the primary carers or the family set up in general. It is not necessarily to do with how you are fed but might be to do with what went on in the family dynamics, what was expected of you, others and the carers themselves.