Why We Eat Is as Important as What We Eat
Most of us don’t realize how often we eat when we’re not hungry.
Believe it or not, this can quickly become a problem. For most people, there is a serious disparity between meals they need and meals they fall into the habit of eating. This is often overlooked due to the fact that increased public awareness of the dangers of unhealthy food makes us more concerned with the content of our diet than portion and meal frequency.
Vilification of ‘bad’ food can give us a false idea that so long as we avoid eating certain things, we will be healthy – and that the dangers of obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure won’t affect us so long as we stay away from corn syrup and saturated fats. In actuality, it is our eating habits (when, how often, and how much we eat) as much as the nutritional makeup of the food we eat that decide how healthy our diets are.
Recently, I sat down with Fitness 805‘s life coach and M.A. in Psychology Petra Beumer and asked her that immensely complicated question that seems so simple at first glance:
Why do we eat when we are not hungry?
Her immediate response shouldn’t surprise us. “Using food to feel better is very common,” explains Petra. In times when we are, for whatever reason, feeling down, “reaching for food represents a ‘quick fix’ and provides immediate, however, short-lived comfort.”
No one is able to claim innocence here, and there’s barely a need to explain the problems with this behavior. Beyond the physical health ramifications, reminds Petra, “the emotional eater is left with the original feeling plus the added guilt of eating.”
Lose – lose.
In fact, it’s even worse than this. While being in the habit of eating ‘bad,’ high calorie foods can cause health problems, emotional eating is worse in that it is a habit that can feed off of itself and is almost certain to get worse over time. Comfort eating is a short term solution to a bad mood, and can begin to create a reliance on food as a mood stabilizer, explains Petra. Unlike a weakness for fast food, self-medicating with emotional eating is a problem that tends to worsen over time. The more you rely on food when you feel bad, the worse you will feel and the more you will need to eat.
But it’s not just sufferers of something as serious as chronic depression who find themselves falling into this behavior, we eat for reasons ranging from anxiety to plain old boredom.
Our goal should be to make ourselves fully aware of our own eating habits:
- Keep track of how often you eat between meals, or go for seconds (or thirds). Become aware of your intake amount, not only of what you eat.
- If you find yourself going for food between meals, take a moment to look for an answer as to why you’re eating. If your motivation isn’t hunger, take the time to think. “Emotional eaters need to learn to separate hunger from other needs,” Petra explains. “Ask yourself: What am I really in need of right now? How am I feeling?”
- Petra even suggests people more concerned about their weight may even want to start making entries into a ‘food/mood’ journal in order to keep track of which specific feeling caused you to eat at a specific time.
Now, realizing that feeling down or bored can make you eat shouldn’t make you worry that you’re in worse emotional shape than you thought. We all need little boosts now and then to shake off our mood or worries. So what’s the biggest challenge? Finding activities to stabilize your mood to replace the habit of emotional eating.
- Take a walk. Get yourself out of your house, and you’ll be surprised how much of your stress or bad mood you leave behind.
- Call a friend. Just call someone for no other reason then to talk. Not only is this a useful distraction, interaction tends to boost our spirits at any time.
- Indulge in something else. Read something, watch something, go do something you want to do. Substitute an activity for snacking.
Remember, this is something most of us do now and again. The point is, we need to be aware of when, why and how often we eat when we aren’t hungry, or it can quickly become a real problem. Be mindful, know your habits and learn to distinguish hunger from emotional motivation to eat. You don’t want this sneaking up on you.
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