Originally published in Get Fresh! magazine December 2007:
So you know what to eat, but you’re still not doing it (and maybe you’re not even completely sure why…) or perhaps you’re more than well aware that your emotions are ruling your diet more than your head but you just can’t seem to break the pattern? Ready to ease the pain and get healthy? Karen Knowler clears the path…
Like the majority of the clients I work with, Susan (name changed), 41, had no problem at all sharing with me from the get-go that emotional eating was at the core of her weight and energy issues.
“I just can’t seem to help myself,” she sighed. “It doesn’t matter if my head is busy telling me it’s no good for me or that it will make me gain even more weight, in that moment I really don’t care. I’ll just open the fridge and wolf down whatever looks good at the time… and then of course I just feel fat and sick afterwards. It’s been going on for way too long now. I hate the way I look and feel. I’ve really had enough!”
While for Susan her reason for compulsive overeating was mostly around the loneliness she felt after her mother (also her best friend) unexpectedly moved away, for another client, Sarah, 35, her regular weekend binges were mainly around boredom and a general lack of life direction along with some emotional hangover from a long-term heartbreak that hadn’t been fully healed. For Miranda, 25, it was mostly about self-sabotage; quite simply she didn’t want to stop bingeing because dropping the excess weight would equal “slim”, and slim would mean being sexually attractive. Having been sexually abused as a teenager, slim was not something she therefore aspired to be and food had come to provide the perfect layer of protection – both emotionally and physically; this, to her mind at least, was guaranteed to keep her “safe”, a price she was willing to pay even if she didn’t necessarily love what she saw in the mirror. For Natasha, 32, something completely different again. For her it was all about fear – fear of people, fear of being seen and fear around any new experiences; as we delved deeper we discovered that essentially this came down to a fear of feeling fully alive in her own skin as well as fully engaging with life. By overeating on a daily basis, usually at night after dinner, she could keep very easily keep herself credibly occupied, thus finding herself “mysteriously” devoid of the time or energy required to engage with the world or to face any of those fears that were increasing steadily by the day. Why deal with our stuff when eating is so much easier?
I would estimate that at least 98% of the people I have worked with eat for emotional reasons, and I feel confident that this figure would be just as applicable to any group of people interviewed randomly on any street, in any town, on any day of the week, during any week of the year. Whether it’s for boredom, tiredness, lethargy, depression, sadness, grief or any other negative emotion you care to name, food has become, it seems, the universally applied band-aid for just about every emotional malady conceivable.
But why should this be so?
Many believe, myself included, that this almost unstoppable drive to “eat our pain away” all stems back to babyhood when, as soon as we cried – be it from hunger, tiredness, fear, isolation or whatever upset us at the time – we would automatically have a breast or bottle thrust into our cupid’s bow and all would suddenly be well in the world. Sweet, warm, creamy… Mmmm! Immediately transported, rescued and loved all in one magical, hypnotically dreamy move! When the world seems like a big scary place, to switch your focus completely towards the pleasures coming in, and having your basic human need of feeling “nourished” met instead (and certainly a lot of that nourishment would have come from the sense of close human contact rather than the actual milk), it’s not hard to see why this connection between food and comfort has become so tightly bound into our subconscious since as long as we can remember.
Of course, this “loving” approach to making it all better continued for all of us well beyond those first few months and all the way into and beyond toddler hood. As per infancy, if we hurt ourselves, were sad, lonely, bored, disgruntled, unaccountably blue or had had a bad day at school, then a hand-held trip to the sweet shop, or a “special treat” from the cupboard, fridge or freezer – whatever our issue might be, with a few hungry bites of our food of choice it would all soon be history and our problem solved. Well, for at least five minutes anyway.
In the light of this obviously it’s no wonder that almost all, if not entirely all of us have continued employing this coping pattern well on into adulthood where it has remained an almost automatic response that kicks in during times of stress, pain or worry. This seems to remain no matter who we are, how “evolved” we consider ourselves to be, or any other variable we may throw in to the mix. If we’re human and breathing, we’re very likely doing this to some degree on a fairly regular basis, whether we consciously realise it or not.
For clients coming to me with this issue, essentially of not knowing how NOT to eat for comfort, or indeed what to do instead, because of the niche I work within (raw foods coaching) I am usually gifted with the wonderfully useful head start of them having toyed with raw foods, even if only for a while, and this is how their awareness usually began. For many, just like me, until they tried to “go raw” they had no clue just how often they were eating for emotion, and so when they tried to repeat old patterns and quash their pain with an apple, banana or salad rather than with their usual comfort food of choice, it simply didn’t happen. At this point, as it did for Susan, it becomes abundantly clear: To create a truly happy, nurturing adult relationship with food, we have to find alternative genuinely uplifting and healing ways of getting our emotional needs met – because food never has and never will heal our pain; it can only, ultimately, increase it, along with our waistline.
So where on earth do we begin?
"Dear Karen, I really enjoy reading your eZine and especially the recipes. Here is my dilemma and I know I'm not the only one: no support. I don't think there are any groups that meet to give tips on how to survive a raw diet in a family that dislikes everything about it. That drags me down and then I don't feel like trying to eat healthy. Let's face it, it's easier to do as the Romans do than fight it. Any tips or suggestions? I know when I was strictly raw I felt absolutely fantastic!!"
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