CHENNAI : We all eat to live in order to survive — if we stop eating, we would die. Hence to avoid this fate, we all eat good food and drink enough water. However, nowadays there has been a new prevalent fashion of “live to eat” that’s getting rampant in the society. This new concept has nothing to do with our biological survival. For most of us, emotional/stress eating has become a habit of comfort — in other words, it’s a behaviour induced by certain cues like situations, feelings, people, commercials, etc., Scientific studies done over the years reveal that animals and people that were more stressed ended up eating more and getting fatter.

In general, most of us consider emotional eating as a food addiction, just like we consider shopping, gambling, and other behaviours as addictions. There is no doubt that these behaviours can sometimes seem to take on a life of their own and make you feel like you’re just going along for a scary ride. But are they all same? Well, they do seem like addictions on the surface, and it may be handy to use the term as a metaphor.

We need to understand the difference that emotional eating and other behaviours are compulsions, not addictions. A compulsion is something you feel you have to do; an addiction is something you can’t live without. Emotional eating, therefore, is a psychological compulsion to do something that would otherwise cause emotional distress, not physical withdrawal. 

The force that drives the behaviour, is the need to counteract feeling controlled by certain external forces by acting out against those or other external forces. The goal is to even one’s perception of the playing field in the ongoing tension between external demands and internal autonomy. Learning to recognise your emotional eating triggers is the first step to breaking free from food cravings and compulsive overeating, and changing the habits that have sabotaged our diets in the past.

Using food from time to time as a reward, or to celebrate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But, when eating becomes our primary emotional coping mechanism and when our first impulse is to open the refrigerator whenever we get upset, angry, lonely, stressed, exhausted, or bored, we get stuck up in an unhealthy cycle where the real feeling or problem is never addressed. Remember, emotional hunger can’t be filled with food. Eating may feel good in weak moments, but the feelings that triggered the eating would be still hiding within. 

So, its better to target those hidden feelings rather then turning to unnecessary eating. If you don’t know how to manage your emotions in a way that doesn’t involve food, you won’t be able to control your eating habits for very long. When the urge to eat hits, it’s all one can think about. You feel an almost unbearable tension that demands to be fed. Because you’ve tried to resist in the past and failed, you believe that your willpower isn’t up to snuff. But the truth is that you have more power over your cravings than you think. 

Don’t tell yourself you can’t give in to the craving; remember, the forbidden is extremely tempting. So just try to put off eating for five minutes, or maybe one minute. While you’re waiting, check in with yourself. How are you feeling? What’s going on emotionally? After this process, even if you end up eating, you’ll have a better understanding of why you did it. This can help you set yourself up for a different response next time. 

Psychologist’s who have examined patients with eating disorders found that those who were taught how to meditate had lower levels of relapse and more positive outcomes after release than those who received only conventional diet or nutrition treatments. 

Hence it would not be difficult to recognise value of meditation for elimination of stress eating, and introduce this theory as a subject in education so that the youth can be saved from this disorder. 
Remember, calming the mind for a few minutes may provide the distance needed to make a reasonable and healthy decision about whether to eat a chocolate cake or go in for a meditation session. Let us all make the right choice of a healthy future by saying no to emotional eating and yes to meditation.