Richard Kuhns

Emotional Eating to Feed Your Feelings

The best way to avoid feeling emotions is to feed feelings. Typical advice on how to lose weight is totally recylced and useless. It's more important to get in touch with our resistances to feeling the feelings.

Do you feed your feelings with emotional eating? If you over eat when you feel down, upset, bored, excited, happy, confused, joyful, uncertain, malaise, bored..., then you are feeding your feelings.

Can you look at each of those feelings as a different persona? Sound strange?

Yes, there's Mr. Joy, Mrs. Boredom, Ms. Confusion, Master Upset and they are all searching for a companion to have fun.  And they find tons of individuals with whom to play their games.

No wonder that the latest obesity statistics are:
   
    * Eight out of 10 over 25 are overweight
    * 25% completely Sedentary
    * 76% increase in Type II diabetes in adults 30-40 yrs old since 1990
    * 58 Million Overweight; 40 Million Obese; 3 Million morbidly Obese
    * 78% of American's not meeting basic activity level recommendations
These feelings are having a hell of a lot of fun and what does the poor emotional eater do? Answer: Binge on carbs.

What good does it do to talk about healthy eating habits, diets, advice to feel good about you, priorities, meditation, yoga, deep breathing, relationship advice... when it's the emotions themselves that are the culprit?

The quandary is that advice is not the answer even to dealing with the feeling of emotion. I can imagine someone saying, "Take a deep breadth when you're frustrated, angry, or bored." Not that it might not help, but it will help no more than all the other advice.

It is the beliefs about these emotions where we will find the answer. That is, why they should be avoided or not felt, or we don't deserve them or why they don't help.

The more obese one is the more incapacitated he/she is to feeling certain emotions or feelings. The truth is that we are emotionally crippled--crippled usually at some age in our social development. This happens with any emotion and at any age.

Depending on how incapacitated one is, this is defined as post traumatic stress disorder by psychologists.

This would generally apply to the severely obese--70 or more pounds overweight|Generally those who are 70 or more pounds overweight are emotional incapacitated in one or more areas]. Yet, once identified, it's really no big deal. It's that the subconscious mind has been frozen at a particular age in regard to its ability to feel certain emotions. The object is to bring the subconscious mind through education. Hypnosis is a very powerful tool to accomplish this.

Yet, while one may not be physically incapacitated with 70 or more extra pounds, one could be mentally frozen with 15 or 20 pounds that never go away. The object is to become boring for Mr. Emotion.

A realistic approach to managing weight involves asking important questions "What is missing? Why are you not getting the results you've been promised from the experts and resources you've consulted?" It is clearly insane to keep using the same recycled advice regarding fad dieting when the results are not permanent. Would it not be more beneficial to get a handle on emotional eating--eating emotional stress than to focus on the scale? Besides focusing on the scale doesn't empower you to be a better more enlightened person, whereas learning how to overcome emotional eating empowers you in all aspects of your life. If you're a teacher, you'll be a better teacher. If you're an assembly line worker, you'll be a better assembly line worker; a mother, a better mother... Overall, you'll build self worth and find that what you really want to eat is far more nutritious and less in quantity than you ever before imagined possible.

Article Tags: Emotional Eating

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