What is emotional hunger and how to overcome it!
How many times have we heard about the so called emotional hunger, but how many times especially after a hectic day from a mental point of view or a stressful situation, have you headed towards the refrigerator or kitchen cupboards in the search of a snack that could make you feel better?
Well emotional hunger really exists, we don’t only eat to feed ourselves or our body but very often we eat to feed our mind and to overcome emotions that seem to absorb all our energy, just the same way like when we are sad we try to drown our sadness with ice cream or something very sweet for example. Sometimes we turn to food to celebrate something and in this case it is not a negative situation, but when we turn to food because of disappointment, anger, stress, boredom or other negative feelings, food becomes the only strategy to overcome these emotions, this way we avoid facing the actual problem.
The “hunger” that comes from emotions can not only be satisfied with food, and if this makes us feel better for a little while right after the problem, the emotion will come back again soon after; and very often one can end up feeling even worse than before because he/she will feel guilty for the high calorie intake, creating a further helplessness feeling, both towards the food to which we say no, and also towards the emotion that we try to suffocate.
ASPECTS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF EMOTIONAL HUNGER
The so called emotional hunger or also nervous hunger is different from real or physical hunger, by certain important aspects which we can consider to analyse our behaviour, infact nervous hunger:
- DOES NOT CONSIDER THE TYPE OF FOOD: if it is emotional hunger that what we eat does not count at all, it can be salty or sweet, large or little quantities, when we eat for real hunger instead we tend to choose and actually enjoy what we are consuming.
- IT DOESN’T MATTER IF WE ARE ALREADY FULL: when the hunger is emotional we tend to continue eating, and stop only in front of some evident discomfort or if we feel sick, on the contrary to physical hunger when we stop when we are full.
- COMES SUDDENLY: it cannot be programed and neither gradual it comes suddenly and with a certain urge, we almost have the need to eat.
- COMFORT FOOD: Nervous hunger has its favourite foods the so called “comfort food”, the ones that make you feel better usually contain lots of fat and sugar.
- UNCONTROLLABLE DESIRE: it comes as an uncontrollable urge
- GUILTY FEELING: Most of the times nervous hunger leads also to guilty feelings, almost shame, one feels sorry for what he/she has done to himself/herself, deep down inside us we know when it is physical hunger because we don’t feel guilty or nervous hunger for which we sometimes feel ashamed of.
HERE IS A TEST TO UNDERSTAND IF IT IS EMOTIONAL OR NERVOUS HUNGER
We can even by ourselves understand if it is nervous hunger and we can do this by asking ourselves some simple questions, if the answer to most of these questions is yes than it is probably nervous hunger, this means that we do not handle in the correct way some of our deepest emotions.
QUESTIONS:
-does food help you feel safe, secure?
-do you eat more when you are stressed?
-do you keep on eating when you feel full?
-do you celebrate something with food?
-do you usually eat until you feel sick?
It is always best to seek specialist advice if we think that we suffer from emotional hunger too many times, but we can also do a lot by ourselves too by trying to be AWARE when we are going through a nervous hunger attack, we must find the strength to stay in the present and stop to reflect. We have to understand in full that the food is not the problem, but that we are facing a different problem right with the food. The first step to take is to give a name to the emotion tha is trouncing you, trying to understand in order to be able to give a meaning to what we are living and learn to accept it.
Take a look at our tried and tested method: Anti-Diet
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