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Coping through calories: the powerful link between emotions and eating
RAISA MEHZABEEN
Some days are upsetting. Perhaps for a reason or for no reason at all. How can I overcome this bad feeling? To forget this feeling, people often turn to food. This is called emotional eating. To ease work stress, financial problems, and relationship tensions, people turn to comforting foods for various negative emotions. This appetite is not like a physical one. It is about our brain, not our stomach.
Why this emotional eating?
As the name implies, this problem is related to emotions. Researchers have identified some of the factors that affect emotional eating. These are -
Stress: When you suffer from stress, the body starts producing a stress hormone called cortisol, and the effect of that cortisol awakens in the brain a strong desire to eat sweet, salty, or fried food.
Emotion relief: Eat to get rid of the burden of various negative emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, loneliness, shame, etc.
To get rid of boredom: Many people resort to emotional eating to get rid of the deep dissatisfaction and depression in their minds by eating delicious food.
Childhood habits: Many parents reward their children for good deeds with food. Many parents tend to cook sweets and ice cream if they get good results or to give up any bad habits. In this way, the matter of food is associated with those happy childhood memories. So many people who suffer from nostalgia or want to get back to their childhood happiness want to get back to the old days by eating those foods.
Relationship between emotional eating and diet:
Emotional eating usually refers to a condition in which someone is hungry or feels hungry all the time. It has a deep relationship with diet. If your diet is high in carbohydrates and low in protein and fat, which reduces our appetite, then the amount of insulin in the blood increases. As a result, you will continue to feel hungry again and again.
When a person sleeps less, the amount of Ghrelin hormone in their blood increases, which increases the feeling of hunger in the body, and the amount of leptin hormone, which reduces the feeling of hunger, decreases. Water keeps our stomachs full and reduces hunger.
Many people mistake the feeling of thirst for water with the feeling of hunger and eat more. This is especially the case with children. Eating more fibrous foods releases the hormone satiety. As a result, the feeling of hunger decreases. If there is less fibre in your diet, you get hungry quickly.
The habit of reading books, looking at mobile phones, being busy at work, etc. during meals disrupts our food satisfaction. As a result, hunger is felt quickly. If someone eats liquid food all day, such as soups, juices, smoothies, etc., then they will often feel hungry.
Eating food slowly and chewing it more often gives more time to the body and brain. The body produces anti-hunger hormones, so you will feel satisfied and less hungry. The opposite happens when you eat fast food.
How to control emotional eating:
• Relieve Negative Emotions in a healthy way
• Exercise
• Yoga
• Write down what you are eating
• Eat a balanced and nutritious diet regularly
• Avoid unhealthy foods
• Keep track of how much you eat
• Focus on food, not anything else
• Seek expert help