This is one of my favorite quotes and always brings me back to the present moment. Enjoy!
Keep my word positive. Words become my behaviors. Keep my behaviors positive. Behaviors become my habits. Keep my habits positive. Habits become my values. Keep my values positive. Values become my destiny.
Mahatma Gandhi
I have just created a special report on the top 5 nutrition myths out there. Avoid being misled by mainstream research and know the truth now. You could be damaging your health! To get this report sign up below!
I can’t seem to lose the weight despite continuous efforts to do so; I just keep craving and bingeing…
Food cravings are one of the subtle, cultured forms of addiction and compulsive behavior that are very difficult to discern. It is acceptable to have an addiction when it comes to food, or so it seems. We all have them and we all treat people with this particular addiction (addiction to food) entirely different to someone who is addicted to alcohol or other drugs.
Where as someone who craves alcohol would be encouraged to seek help, those of us who crave sugary snacks are often – if not all the time – encouraged to indulge in our addictions. And if we don’t indulge we will often hear the retort:
“Why are you depriving yourself?”
“A little isn’t going to hurt!”
Can you honestly say that the foods you crave are not addictions?
Most foods that are craved have no nutritional benefit to you and can cause and contribute to a number of different health conditions including excess fat, diabetes, heart disease etc.
Why would you want to eat these foods other than for comfort and pleasure? You wouldn’t. It is your addiction to them that makes you eat them.
Food has the power to control you in this way. Sugar, salt and foods laced with fat are emotionally and physically addictive. In order to rid yourself of these substances from your life, the first step is to admit there is a problem. This is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you think you are eating that sandwich out of hunger.
But cravings are a bent form of hunger and it is quite possible that you may have never felt what true hunger feels like. You are probably used to the unger that gets your stomach growling, that makes you feel agitated and that resultings in your needing food right then and there.
This is not hunger – it is addiction.
Addiction is anything that has become stronger than your willpower to change.
Bread, sweets, coffee, meat and salt among a million other foods, provide you with false needs and behavior patterns that are destructive to your well being and can have a greater authority in behavior than the natural desire to eat and drinnk. The salt, fat and crunch of junk food offer emotionsl of fulfillment that are lacking because of a spritiual vacuum – a feeling deep down inside that something is missing.
Emotional emptiness is the source of addiction in most cases – dependency on pleasure to temporarily numb our feelings of hopelessness is usually the root issue.
The sensations of hunger and thirst are homeostatic mechanisms which help the body maintain optimum levels of energy, nutrients and water. When addictive foods are eaten repeatedly, the body adjusts homeostasis to be balanced with the food in the system. Over time the body will become dependent on that substance for homeostatic balance and its removal will cause withdrawal. The body cries out for the missing substance as just intense hunger cries for food.
Control has been established on the inside of you. Even if there is an intense desire to lose weight there is often failure and discouragement.
But how did it all come about?
The potential and most likely start of food addiction is from the moment you were born. Living in a society that deems food as a social function and emotional poise it can be hard not to associate food with emotion/feelings (whether they are good or bad).
This would seem to suggest that we are all addicted to food and I would say we are to some extent. However, not everyone has a problem with food.
Some people overuse this method of consuming food at an emotional/social event, pushing it into every aspect of their lives. It may have started with an upset in childhood, where your mother gave you some cookies or cake to make you feel better, and as you grew you began to use this comfort as a way of easing your pain whenever pain arose. You went through your teens with the usual social awkwardness and pubescent pains and food was your way to make it easier. You then went onto college and a stressful job and the only comfort you had was food. Your days revolved around you coming home from work and comforting yourself with a takeaway or something else. It was your little treat.
Unfortunately this is an all too common scenario for people and a lot of people do not recognize they have an issue and if they do have some awareness, they do not take it seriously because the world doesn’t take it seriously. The world does not recognize it as an addiction.
Overeating is a powerful way to change the state of your mind. Eating is a way to silence the mind.
The compulsion to eat sets up a very painful process. It makes one feel weak and out of control. It prevents many from successfully losing weight and eating a healthy diet, because the endless slip ups and indulgences into junk food for comfort can leave one in a very low insecure place.
Emotional eaters have a dependency on food to get through life – to survive challenges. Many of us are emotional eaters. We avoid emotion, we avoid allowing emotion to flow through us and instead we void it by numbing it. This doesn’t work though, because that pain is still there, we have just put it off.
Emotional eating is instant gratification and short lived, but it is a very hard thing to break free from. However, to be able to control our eating, to lose weight and to live a fulfilling satisfying life, it is crucial that emotional eating is addressed.
Emotions aren’t something one should fear, we should embrace every one that we feel and experience and that’s just it: we should allow ourselves to feel and experience them. The more we do so, the better we are able to manage them and more able e are to cope in stressful situations in the world. The world will also be a much more interesting place and wonderful place.
We need to make peace with our food and we need to allow ourselves to be happy. You can beat your addictions, you can break your reliance on food and the first step to do so is to be aware of your reliance.
Some questions to think about concerning your own emotional eating:
(Being aware of the following questions throughout the course of a day can help you better answer them)
For more information on how to overcome cravings click here
The Social & Emotional Aspects of Eating Video
This is a video of a talk by Professor Rozalind Gruben/Graham on the social and emotional aspects of eating. It is a great introduction to the social and emotional aspects and I wholeheartedly recommend you watch it (along with the other parts to it).
Here is part one:
I thought I would share this video of positive affirmations. Waking up and watching this video is a great way to start your day and gets you in a good positive mood. Enjoy 
“How is a man who is already sick to be made less so by swallowing a substance that would sicken – even kill -him if he were to take it in a state of health? The theory that a serious disease can be removed by creating a temporary and less serious one must have been invented in a madhouse!”
Dr Herbert Shelton
The Health Quote for today is:
“The fact is, we are always kidding ourselves into believing that the things we are in the habit of doing are the very things we should do; that the things we have learned to like are the things that are best for us. And consciously or unconsciously resist any proposed change, even if there are plenty of evidences that the change would be for the better!”
Dr Herbert Shelton
Today’s health quote is:
“Many of the seemingly good feelings that junk-fooders experience are associated with stimulation from toxic ingestion of poisoned food – and not from high quality nutrition at all.
KEEP AWAY FROM JUNK FOOD!”
Dr Alec Burton, 1985
The fuel to emotional eating is emotional hunger. Unfortunately, no matter what you do, you will always have emotional hunger. It is what makes us human but this doesn’t mean we have no hope of dealing with it. The emotional hunger isn’t the problem; it is how you deal with it that really counts.
At the moment, the only way you may know how to deal with emotions is to eat or you may be the type who uses food on certain occasions to deal with an emotion. You may even be someone who doesn’t think they use food for comfort but doesn’t really know if they do or not.
For me, I was really unaware of the way I used food for comfort. When I started stripping my diet down and eating low fat foods, I really started to see that I did use food for emotional comfort and a LOT of the time too. I still have moments now where I struggle to keep awareness of my feelings. I am lucky though to have some great support through it.
When you eat for emotional reasons, you can become so attached to dealing with the ups and downs of life with food that any suggestion that you can actually stop this makes you nervous. In Part One: An Introduction to Emotional Eating I mentioned people going into a blind panic and bingeing, this is what I am talking about here. You are dependent on food for comfort. It is like security to you, no wonder it makes you nervous if that was to be taken away! Many people simply cannot imagine being able to handle a bad day without food there for comfort.
When you are an emotional eater, you really do feel truly hungry and when the craving grips you, you can’t tell its not really hunger. People who are not emotional eaters usually eat less when they are troubled by emotion hunger. Their emotional hunger doesn’t feel like physical hunger.
Emotional hunger and the feeling that you are truly hungry, has so much power over you that it drives you to go to almost any lengths to satisfy it. Have you driven to the store late at night just to get some junk food?
There is such power in emotional hunger that if you do not deal with the underlying issues to it, you will always be at its mercy. It will control you.
Some signs of emotional hunger:
If you are compelled to eat in this way and cannot be patient, then you know it is most likely an emotional issue you are dealing with.
Are you an emotional eater? Do you feel compelled to eat in stressful situations?
Below I have put together some questions you may want to take the time to answer if you feel that you could be an emotional eater. These will help you get a better understanding of yourself and your eating.
Activity: During your day be more aware of your eating habits and notice when you eat out of true hunger versus emotional hunger. Note down whether your feelings on this. Were you surprised at how much you used it to numb yourself?
For A Complete Guide on Cravings Click Here
Health quote today is:
“Self-care is paying attention to a beneficial way of living your life – so that your exchanges and your interactions with other people are loving and caring and so that your attitudes toward yourself are that way too“.
Kennethh Pelletier, 1977
Kelly Aziz
Founder, Eating-Naturally.com
Author, Free To Eat Series
This website will help you with food cravings, emotional eating, healthy weight loss, eating naturally, weight loss mindset and weight loss planning.
