Emotional eating

I never considered myself an emotional eater, in fact I was quite the opposite.  If I had feelings, I would just choose not to eat and that would be my focus.  The overeating came from my body simply needing nourishment and food.  There have been times in my life I have emotionally consumed food, of course, but that's just the way it goes.

Here's what concerns me:  While emotional eating is a serious issue, why does it have to be the target of something to fix in every instance?  Let me explain.

Repetitive emotional eating, or binge eating, is an eating disorder.  Are there different shades of gray in this?  Yes.  By and large, emotional and binge eating is a coping mechanism for dealing with bad feelings.  That sounds simple, but narrowed down, this is pretty much what it is, with a ton more complexities.  This type of eating disorder deserves as much attention as it is getting because coping with emotions by dealing with food in any way (or exercise) is not going to solve the real problems going on.  This can take a lot of soul searching, maybe some therapy and time and work to retrain our brains to cope in other ways, like painting or gardening.

Then there is emotional eating that just happens.  It just happens.  We're alone at night watching TV and without being hungry, we have some ice cream.  Or we are at a social and everyone else is eating, so we do too no matter what our hunger level is.  We have a bad day and decide to treat ourselves to a brownie.  And then we have a good day, so we take ourselves out for lunch and get something "naughty".

It is this type of emotional eating that is also getting a lot of attention, claiming this is something that must be stopped, that you must become mindful of what you eat at all times and if you emotionally eat, you've failed and must get back on that mindful, intentional and natural eating.

Why?

Our culture (ah, my favorite phrase) uses food as reward and punishment.  While this isn't a great idea as a whole, it's just what it is.  We get cake on our birthdays, drinks after a hard day's work and give our kids candy when they've brought home a good report card.  Certain foods are labeled treats, whether we agree with the reasoning behind that.  Would I like this to change so all food is devoid of labels?  You bet, but perhaps with some exceptions.  Birthday cake is great because it has my name on it, not because it's the only time a year I eat cake.  That's truly a treat, taste and all.

What I am saying is there are times we will eat that have nothing to do with hunger or fueling our bodies.  And there are time when we engage in this kind of eating that won't be so great.  We'll overeat, or under eat.  Or have nothing but fried food one day for whatever reason.  The urge right away is to judge ourselves not because of the food we ate and what quantities, but the reason why. Now we can double judge ourselves, blaming our intentions and why we didn't stop the emotional eating if we simply knew what was going on.  We are now called to say to ourselves "not only did I have ice cream, but I did it because I was bored - oh why did I do that! Shame on me for eating out of boredom!"

Again, it's when these patterns of emotional eating happen frequently over time where the real issues need to be addressed.  And maybe issues need to be addressed in the occasional emotional indulgence.  But let's not be so hard on ourselves.  Can we give ourselves a pass if we have popcorn at the movies even though we have eaten a meal earlier?  Can it be OK to have a sundae if we're feeling low and be done with that?  Why must we constantly police ourselves under the new rules of intuitive eating?  (see what I did there?)

Therefore, I think occasional emotional eating is part of natural eating - it needs to be in order to be human.  In the end, it all levels out.  We're imperfect, our bodies realize this and adjust.  Perhaps instead of being so mindful about eating food, we can be mindful about living life.