While there is no shortage of diet books, holistic nutrition strategies and new fitness equipment on the market, the problems of being overweight and obese continue to grow with the number of people being affected by these serious but preventable conditions. There must be something else going on here.

We all seem to have some kind of relationship with food. We don’t just use food to satisfy our physical hunger; we sometimes use it to quell our emotional hunger as well. If we educate ourselves about why we eat and why we choose the particular foods that we do, we start to see how our emotions play a pivotal role in our health. In the book “Shrink Yourself: Break Free from Emotional Eating Forever,” Roger Gould, M.D., the Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA, says that emotional eating is a way of satisfying emotional hunger. By doing this, you are just using food as a way of coping, to comfort yourself and to deal with life. That means you eat for reasons other than what your body needs.

At one point or another, we all take part in emotional eating behavior. For example, you could consume an entire pizza after a bad day at work, or comfort yourself by eating chocolate if you have had an argument with your significant other. But when this condition goes too far, it crosses the line into food addiction, where you actually lose control over what and how you eat.

Dr. Gould points out that all of us have emotional hunger. The difference between an emotional eater and a non-emotional eater is how they respond to this hunger. When presented with a challenge, an emotional eater has a knee-jerk reaction to reach for whatever food will offer him or her a moment of comfort. Comfort foods do not represent healthy choices and are far from what we might term “holistic nutrition,” such as heavy pastas, refined carbohydrates, ice cream and other fast foods.

We pay little regard to nutrition, health or even real hunger when we engage in emotional eating. In fact, eating is usually hurried, with very little awareness of what is being consumed, and therefore emotional eaters are more prone to overeating.

Food offers relief from stress or emotional discomfort and provides a refuge and safety net that we can quickly turn to for solace and security. Food becomes the drug that distracts us from whatever discomfort we are feeling. By focusing on our emotional eating habits, we ignore the real cause of the issue.

But food is just a temporary bandage. Whatever is causing you to emotionally eat will inexorably return to haunt you. And worst of all, now there are usually new feelings of guilt, remorse, anger, and isolation once you have given in to the emotional eating.

There is a very large difference between wanting to change and actually changing. It’s difficult for the person who is prone to emotionally eat to see the difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger. This is why it is so important to examine how your relationship to food triggers your behavior.

Understanding food addiction’s powerful grasp and the underlying issues that lead us to emotional eating are paramount in helping us to recover and heal. As soon as this understanding begins, you can start your process of recovery and your concentration on holistic nutrition concepts, based on a really solid footing.

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