The Hunger Spectrum

When people talk about emotional eating I often picture extreme stress or other uncomfortable emotions followed by the conscious decision to eat or binge to numb that feeling. Although this does happen and is obviously not natural, I'm finding that many times identifying emotional eating can be a little less obvious. Sometimes I don't even recognize emotional eating until I look back after I've eaten way too much in a distracted or unconscious way. I don't necessarily notice feeling ultra stressed out or depressed so I figure, oh, a couple of bites in front of the TV won't hurt, but then a couple bites becomes the whole piece, and the whole next piece, and so on. Before I know it, I've totally fallen way out of whack and am left discouraged, disappointed, and a little bewildered that I turned down that road again! Why do I not recognize it and what it will become at the beginning? 

With no way to deal with them growing up, I have practiced since I was young not to "feel" painful, sometimes taboo emotions. In my environment these were the majority of emotions but especially sadness, depression, anxiety, loneliness, love, kind words, appreciation, acceptance, disagreement, etc. and as I grew, I became more and more hungry for the emotional needs that I was not receiving. Like the majority of our society, I was also immersed in emotional and moral associations with food and appearance, and as I got older, I began to recognize that food made uncomfortable feelings go away or a while. Gradually my body began to associate emotions with food signals and my emotional "hunger" began to display similar thoughts and sensations to biological hunger. I had "hunger" in my emotional self so my body physically told me "I want food! I'm hungry!" This skewed mind-body signal became even more engrained as I continued to reinforce it with emotional eating or restricting.

Over the years my mind-body has learned that it is safer to feel hungry for food. Food never disappoints, it never leaves me or falls back on its commitments. When I'm biologically hungry I can eat and the hunger pangs subside. The problem with emotional eating is that the hunger I am truly experiencing is not biological, and feeding a biological hunger will never truly satisfy the actual "hunger." Eating feels good at first. It numbs me during that initial euphoria as I "use" it, but it never seems to fill me up. I can't get enough. I continue to eat, searching for satisfaction from my emotional hunger but I can't quite grasp it and at the end I'm left wondering "what the heck just happened!?"

Knowledge of ourselves is a powerful thing. If we can recognize that all encompassing "hunger feeling" and break it up into its components, like a prism separates the components of white light into a whole spectrum of colors, then we can identify exactly what types of hunger we are experiencing. Are the biological sensations sincere? Am I hungry for peace, rest, friendship, companionship, love, purpose, something to do? If I'm biologically hungry, food is the best food! But, if I'm hungry for acceptance or friendship, food will not fill me. Take a moment to feel the true hunger that you are experiencing and realize that it is ok.

"You aren't a bad person with low will power simply because you've eaten to cope! The problem is: long ago all of your hungers became confused into one signal - the signal for food. Be grateful for all the ways eating has helped you survive." -V Hansen, S. Goodman