Understanding the problem

Dr Sharma's post today, http://www.drsharma.ca/obesity-plate-or-pyramid-why-nobody-really-cares-about-nutrition-guides.html, shows the understanding of some of the problem, without a clear solution. There are a different groups who have a partial solutions, each without a clear understanding of the total problem.

There is another side that must be looked at and that is excessive hunger. Each individual physical causes must be sought out and confronted before long term recovery can be assured.

Resentments are the number one issue for many of us. Any recovery program must include a big dose of self evaluation, resulting in a change of life style and thinking with respect to food, eating and all the ritual around weight. Our resentments toward others, and ourselves, must be examined. I have a resentment toward myself for not being able to follow a food program perfectly. OH well, shit happens. We need to look at our delusion, aversions, and attachments to foods and food behaviors as well as all our emotions and feelings. Judith Beck’s book makes a nice start in this direction.

We also need to have enough biochemistry and physiology to separate the myths about food from the real information. There is to much really wrong crap in the public media.

Dr. Sharma's series on surgery failures suggests that these fail for the same group of reason most diets fail, long term. That is lack of change in our thinking, attitude, intentions, and knowledge. We may need to adjust, our speech, actions and livelihood to adapt to the needed changes in our life to really deal with the food issues. This all will require a fair bit of study, and concentration to go along with the mindful efforts.

Keep up the struggle as we trudge the road to happy destiny.

emotional eating

Is ‘emotional eating’ always due to emotions?

Posted on 3 May 2011

for the record from from http://www.drbriffa.com/2011/05/03/is-emotional-eating-always-due-to-emotions/

Some individuals have themselves down as ‘emotional eaters’. The idea here is that they sometimes feel driven to eat foods as a result of their emotional state. Usually, this is in response to ‘negative’ states such as stress, anxiety or sadness. In a moment, I’m going to suggest two approaches that, in my experience, can be highly effective for dissolving emotional eating effectively and quickly. Before that though, I wanted to explore for a moment whether emotional eating is always as emotional as we think it is…

Imagine someone suffers from a tendency to unstable blood sugar levels. When blood sugar levels drop, biochemical and physiological changes occur in the body including the secretion of ‘stress’ hormones like adrenaline. The brain will also tend to increase its production of a substance called glutamate which has the capacity to increase anxiety.

Allied to any change in mood, low blood sugar levels can also provoke a craving for foods that replenish sugar quickly into the bloodstream such as chocolate, biscuits or bread. But here’s the question: what caused the food cravings – the person’s emotions, or the fact that they dropped their blood sugar level in the first place?

In my experience, many individuals who believe they have an ‘emotional eating’ problem appear to have nothing of the sort. How do I know this? Because, I’ve seen time and again that when an ‘emotional’ eater eats properly, and in particular stabilise their blood sugar level, their ‘emotional ‘eating’ just disappears. In many individuals, what appears to be a psychological issue is, in reality, physiological in nature.

This is not to say that emotional eating cannot happen – it most certainly can. For example, after repeated offering of sweet foods as a treat or pacifier in childhood it is undoubtedly possible for individuals to associate such foods with certain emotions. If that is genuinely the case for you, then taking a more mind-oriented approach may indeed help.

To understand how best to approach this sort of issue, it helps to understand a bit more about the mind. The brain can be thought of as having two major components: the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind is what, among other things, allows you to think about things and rationalise and work things out. While you’ve been reading this book, it’s likely that your conscious mind will have been quite active.

The unconscious mind, as its name suggests, controls unconscious thoughts and behaviours. Many emotional responses are seated here. An example is my spider phobia. I am afraid of spiders, even though I know that here in the UK they can’t hurt me in any meaningful way. In my unconscious mind I have associated spiders with some form of threat. And no amount of talking it through with a therapist or attempting to rationalise this in my own mind is unlikely to make much difference. Basically, taking a conscious approach to a problem that is unconscious is nature is of questionable value. It’s a bit like attempting to work on a problem with the engine of a car without first flipping the bonnet.

What this means is that for a genuine emotional eating issue we need to ‘flip the bonnet’ and get access to the unconscious mind. In my experience, two approaches that have considerable merit here are hypnotherapy and ‘emotional freedom technique’ (EFT). The latter can be learned and self-applied relatively easily, and plenty of resources regarding it are available on-line.