EMOTIONAL EATING AND WEIGHT GAIN

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Emotional eating is one of the eating disorders that majority of women are suffering from. Are you aware of the emotional eating aspects of gaining weight? How does your belly fat feel? If your answer is spongy and squishy, you can be accurate. But the fat also contains other feelings, happy, lonely or anxious.

Your belly is not present in a vacuum. It affects, and it is altered by a complicated series of hormones that course through the body and brain continually.  Emotions drive those hormones. Your body indicates your emotional state – when you are feeling guilty, your stomach churns when you are angry your blood pressure soars when you are afraid, and your heart pound.

Your belly fat also gives a response. When the emotionally driven hormones act on the fat cells, its result is losing or gaining of fatty tissues. At other times, they direct the behaviors that result in more significant weight gain. In both ways, when you are in touch with your feelings, it can assist you in getting a flat stomach.

WEIGHT GAIN: IT’S EMOTIONAL

The most significant cause of overeating or its major contributor is emotional eating, and it is almost 88% of the time.

A great determination that people make every year is to lose weight. Within a short time, most of the people get failed in their aims, resulting in a sense o disappointment and failure in them. An aspect that contributes to this lack of success is called “Emotional Eating.” It is also known as “Comfort Eating.” It takes place when individuals make use of food to alter or manage their unpleasant feelings like boredom, loneliness, depression, and worry. It includes the intake of energy-dense, fatty and sweet meals with a high concentration of calories like biscuits and cakes.

A significant contributor to the obesity epidemic and type 2 diabetes is the overeating of some energy-dense foods for some emotional reasons. Hence, the benefits of realizing and addressing this issue are huge. Thus, the research shows that even when individuals look for medical advice and get assistance for the problem, it is uncommon that the doctor explores the emotional cause of overeating.

EMOTIONAL HUNGER

The physical hunger initiates in the stomach; it is slow, and not linked to any particular food. The emotional hunger comes suddenly and gets started in the head or mouth, desire for a specific item of food and does not ends even when the individual feels full.

Emotional eating is mindless; you do not pay attention to the amount taken and eating quickly.  When you are eating, you do not enjoy it and feel guilty and ashamed later.

CAUSES OF EMOTIONAL EATING

The individuals experience stressful and negative feelings proceeding to the emotional eating episode. Stress affects our eating behavior through cortisol, a stress hormone, that results in craving high-fat and sugary foods. It provides you an energy burst, but it results in a sugar crash that causes you to feel tired and irritable again. In addition to these, a diet rich in carbohydrates permits more of the tryptophan, essential amino acid into the brain that assists in maintaining a balanced mood.

• The emotional eaters utilize food as a solution for distracting themselves or numbing themselves from negative feelings. Also, emotional stress can result in failure or a decrease in self-control.
• The daily hassles are thoughts, events, and situations that assist in producing negative feelings like worry, annoyance, and frustration that one’s plans and goals can be demanding to attain. A few studies reveal that these daily hassles are linked with the unhealthy behaviors of eating.
• The learned association of food from childhood as a comforter and reward also affect the eating behavior when you are an adult and the ongoing use of the treat foods to assist the people in feeling better leads to the continued emotional eating. The warm memories and nostalgia of eating particular foods with the family can result in a person to utilize these foods for overcoming the feelings of sadness and loneliness.
• As compared to the non-eaters, emotional eaters have a more persuasive and potent influence when they see the advertisements for free products. The power of advertising is definite that most of the emotional eaters make a lot of effort to keep away the ads. Even the packaging of the food products matter, the individuals prefer to remain unnoticed of the nutrition present in the packet, to resist them feeling ashamed.
• A bad mood can lead you to try to comfort yourself with food and loneliness is all about bad feelings. But the association of weight gain and isolation is more significant than that. Some individuals feel loneliness with the increased circulating levels of Ghrelin, the appetite-stimulating hormone, causing them to be hungry soon.
• When couples are being married or transitioned into marriage, both are associated with gaining weight. It is due to the increased chances of eating more due to large portion meals, regular and shared foods, along with a decrease in weight maintenance and declines in the physical activity to attract your partner.
• When you feel deprived, it manifests itself as hunger. When you deprive yourself of something, you have the most probability to overeat; in spite of how fit you want to be.
• When you are anxious, the body feels like you are under tremendous stress all the time. For weight gain, anxiety is a powerful trigger. It is among the significant factors associated with gaining weight. Two-thirds of individuals with eating disorders suffer from anxiety.
• When there is stress, the very first thing that your body does is adrenaline production. It causes the fat cells all around the body to squirting their stores of fatty acid into the bloodstream; they can be utilized for energy purposes.
• When you are getting bored, you can lose the ability to make your choices for smart food; you will become an emotional eater. Boredom converts you into the worse type of emotional eater because you do not make choices for wrong food, you eat many fattening foods that you usually can. It is of the top reasons when you are inquired about the emotions before you eat is boredom.

A great chance to engage in emotional eating is social eating in the company of friends and family. In such settings, the emotional eaters consume more food, and it is because of the evident social approval for the behavior. Hence, the non-emotional eaters have less probability of overeating in these situations.

HOW TO DEAL WITH EMOTIONAL EATING?

You can keep a food diary for recording the episodes of when, where, and what you eat, along with your thoughts and mood at the time of eating and afterward.  It is vital in helping you to explore your eating patterns and stimulates for emotional eating and what feelings you attempt to manage through eating. Individuals who make these diaries will be more prosperous in making positive changes in the eating patterns.

• You should deal with the physical symptoms of tension and stress through your practice of regular exercise and progressive muscle relaxation that improves confidence and mood and reduce anxiety.
• Make use of problem-solving techniques to start solving the issues that you can attempt in managing through the emotional eating like those relationship problems, work or daily hassles.
• It includes first pinpointing the problems, setting aims and solutions that you love to achieve, pondering on the strategies and steps that will assist you in achieving your objectives, practicing these, looking at your progress and ongoing to make alterations when required. In spite of saying that you cannot have your favorite food at all, console yourself by saying that you can have it later. It results in craving the food less and taking less amount of it.
• Bring your attention to what you eat; you can eat mindfully. You should include all the sense when you look at your food, inhale the aroma, notice the food’s texture, taste it and chew it before you swallow. Make eating your only work by not doing the other things when you are eating such as watching television or using a smartphone. When you eat healthy foods that are a source of nutrients and chemicals, it assists in improving mood like dark chocolate, cheese, sesame seeds, nuts, oily fish, eggs, etc.
• You should have a list of alternative distracting and enjoyable activities that you can utilize it when you are feeling the urge to eat for the reasons of non-physical hunger.
• Make some rational expectations. Take small attainable steps and results in long-term outcomes, and do not be disappointed by any setback that may take place. See the support and help of family and friends.

You can talk to an expert health professional if you realize that you require additional support for the reduction of emotional eating and direct the underlying issues that contribute to it and trigger it.

At the Philadelphia Weight Loss Clinic, we pay special attention to the reasons for overeating and thus gaining weight. We believe that in case of emotional eating we have to take care of the emotional stability of the patient’s mind and only after that start a weight loss program.

To find out if emotional eating is part of your overweight condition, contact our clinic to schedule an appointment for the initial evaluation