Let’s start by getting a few key things absolutely clear- your eating habits are not a reflection of a lack of willpower, your morality as a human being or even your just needing that bit more education or motivation.
For the most part what we eat and how we eat is an unconscious process, governed just as our heartbeat or our breathing is by our unconscious mind (or autonomic nervous system).
We’ve come far enough in understanding human biology and neuroscience that this is no longer up for debate.
However, I appreciate someone somewhere reading this may not yet fully trust this or perhaps you may be at the beginning or even on the fence around food freedom and body peace (aka trusting your body) and I get it.
Diet culture takes some serious undoing, so let’s start here.
Start there but not stop there because the purpose of all my blog posts, the purpose of all my work and indeed my life is so often simply to help people become genuinely and authentically kinder to themselves.
Being kind to yourself is a skill.
It’s a skill that can feel uncomfortable to learn or even think about after all we go through that teaches us directly and indirectly to be hard on and often downright horrible to ourselves.
Which to me is exactly why it’s a skill worth learning and developing because by creating a better relationship with yourself you create a better relationship with others and this, more than anything is what the world needs.
If you’re ready to let go of the shame and truly understand how stress and sadness modulate your hunger and eating behaviour here’s a brief introduction to 6 reasons you may find yourself overeating, binge eating, stress eating, emotional eating or any other label you want to slap on it.
As well as real ways you can begin to work with, rather than fight against, your body and by doing so be a part of changing not just your life but the world (I’m not even being over dramatic here).
- Chewing
The act of chewing causes saliva production and herein lies the magic.
Saliva production is under the control of your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) or that branch of your nervous system associated with safety (rest and digest).
Therefore, when you are eating and salivating your body is sending the feedback to your brain that you are safe.
The compulsion to eat food or if you have seen people or are someone yourself who chews gum excessively this in part can be a desperate unconscious attempt to gain a feeling of safety where your body feels there is threat (stress).
Another way of saying why this is that back when the stress response evolved it was to help us switch off our prefrontal cortex (PFC) and run from things which wanted to eat us. Which means it would have been a pretty obvious indicator to our body that were we relaxed enough to be eating we weren’t in any immediate danger (it’s pretty tricky to eat and run).
2. Compulsive
As I mentioned above the stress response governed by the other branch of our autonomic nervous system, our sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is associated with fight or flight.
When we are in fight or flight we are in primal survival mode (ciao PFC and your logical input).
No one asks themselves “would it be useful to lose all control of my body and emotions right now?” and answers “yes”.
Have you?
The stress response happens automatically.
When our PFC is not fully on board, which spoiler alert it’s not if you are under acute or worn out from chronic stress, we act impulsively.
We’re designed to.
After all what’s the point of rational, well thought out and planned responses which take into account all aspects and outcomes for a the best future if we don’t know if we’ll make it through the next 0.0001 second, let alone live to see next year.
In the wild you’d be dead long dead.
In the wild it is better to act and fix up later.
Stress makes us act compulsively.
Better to be safe than sorry as they say.
Not a choice, just a human brain.
3. Conditioning
Have you heard of Pavlov’s dogs?
In brief Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov conducted a series of experiments that showed what’s now termed Pavlovian conditioning in which he served dogs food and rang a bell.
Later he simply rang the bell and found the dogs would salivate in full anticipation of the food.
That is they had come to associate two otherwise completely independent and associated things (food and the sound of a bell) in their minds because they had occurred enough times together.
As mammals this conditioning response also happens in our brains and is one of the things which no doubt kept us alive as a species for so long. This stimulus is associated with this response.
For example, the sound of a branch snapping is associated with possible danger and the response therefore is to run before you’ve even consciously realised you’ve heard a sound.
When it comes to food our brains can do the same thing.
For example, maybe in the past you’ve had a rough break-up and someone you loved came around and comforted you with ice-cream. That ice-cream can become associated with the love of the person sharing the ice-cream with you.
From then on ice-cream can be associated with love. Especially if a similar thing happens on a number of occasions for example you might go back to your childhood and have memories (implicit or explicit) of having fallen off your bike or been punched by your brother and in an attempt to sooth you your parents brought you ice-cream and there it is again an early learning that ice-cream means love.
Pretty simple.
Of course, anyone can resist ice-cream, but what we can’t resist is love and affection. They are fundamental human needs.
4. Comfort
Food can offer a temporary comfort or relief from anxiety or sadness.
When we eat one of the feel-good hormone’s dopamine is released and we feel immediate pleasure.
This is a biologically wired in pleasure-reward system designed to reward us for eating, otherwise we may not place enough importance on eating and simply forget to do so. This could have disastrous consequences given that not eating is incompatible with life.
Eating offers a state change or a shift from one emotion to another and when faced with stress and sadness this is a great thing and exactly what your mind is chasing when you open the fridge door or drive into the drive-through.
Often clients I work with report going into a trance while they binge, and I’ve been here. One memory that comes readily to my mind is being in Puerto Rico eating peanutbutter from the jar on the floor of my room with all the doors shut not wanting to be interrupted.
In that moment the eating was all consuming.
It was just me and the peanutbutter.
I did not have to deal with any other problem in the world and given that I had a lot of other problems and didn’t do much else other than worry about them that moment of trance was bliss to my poor exhausted and utterly starved brain.
5. Cause Shift
Binge eating and overeating can allow us to reattribute the stress we are feeling that we don’t understand to another cause, to the overeating itself.
Thereby taking our focus off the real causes of stress in our life that we feel are too ugly, too hard or simply don’t know how to deal with.
That’s a very useful thing, for a moment.
Food can offer immediate comfort, where looking for a cause and going about fixing that even if we knew how to takes time.
Deflecting the cause can offer temporary relief and there is value in temporary relief but it comes with a catch and that is it is, by definition, only temporary.
6. Compensation
In the same way that we, as mammals have physical needs such as the need for food, water and shelter we also have emotional needs.
In the same way that we suffer when our physical needs are not met we suffer when our emotional needs are not met.
Our emotional needs include; the need to give and receive attention, the need to have a sense of purpose, goals and meaning to our lives, the need to feel a part of a community and be making a contribution, the need for safety, control and autonomy, the need for challenge and growth, the need for intimacy and to know that at least one other person on this planet accepts us for who we are, the need to feel valued and that what we do and who we are is important and the need for privacy or the opportunity to reflect and consolidate our experiences.
When you read this list I hope it all suddenly makes sense.
These are not choices we can simply choose not to need, we need them they are biologically wired into us and if we don’t meet them for whatever reason and there are numerous reasons we may not be our unconscious mind will compensate in any way that it knows how and sometimes this can include binge eating because as I’ve said above eating can become associated with any of these needs.
To give you an example I once worked with a client who drank excessively. She knew this was a problem and was seeing me on referral from her GP due to now having results indicative of liver damage showing up in her recent blood tests, she knew she “should” drink less but also didn’t know another way that she could get the same feeling she got from drinking wine at the end of the day. Fair enough.
Under hypnosis we found that the drinking was associated with socialising i.e. the need to belong, the need to give and receive attention, the need to be a part of community and the need for intimacy were being “met” or rather compensated for through the drinking.
To tell her to just stop drinking, mix her wine half and half with sparkling water or to have some alcohol free days each week would do nothing. She may be able to persist for a little through sheer willpower and determination but how much more miserable would she be if she was removing her main form of emotional belonging from her life?
Instead we did hypnosis until her unconscious mind was able to come up with other ways that worked as well as or better than the drinking to get those emotional needs met. We then went on to discuss practical real life strategies such as joining golf clubs and so on to meet new people. She left those consults feeling empowered and excited to move forward with her life versus afraid of losing something as she had been the first time she walked into my office.
Where to Now?
If you want a real way out, a real way to stop binge eating, emotional eating, stress eating, the internal games, time and life restricting, restraining and potentially debilitating and regain control around food you are going to have to do the work and address which of these 5 underlying areas it is for you.
And hey, it may well be a mix or even all of them plus others because this is by no means an exhaustive list.
They won’t be “cured” because you find the perfect diet or “lifestyle change”. If it is true peace you are after and true access to the totality of who you are and coming anywhere close to experiencing all you could be consider working with a clinical hypnotherapist.
Why? Because clinical hypnotherapy works with the unconscious mind or the autonomic nervous system directly and, as I said right back at the beginning of this post where, our eating and food behaviours are generated. We know this so if you are serious why waste time anywhere else?
You are unique, but not that unique.
You have a human brain and as easy as it is to take things personally (especially when there are multibillion dollar businesses benefiting from you believing the problem is you), I hope after reading this you can gain a greater appreciation that binge eating, emotional eating and stress eating are not personal.
They’re biological.
They’re human.
The question just becomes now, what are you going to do with this information?
With my whole heart I hope you found this information useful and inspiring.
Become Great. Live Great.
Bonnie.
