Emotional eating is a hot topic in the world of weight loss and heath. Website ShrinkYourself.com focuses on getting the root of compulsive eating by understanding the deep causes of overeating: eating for emotional comfort. This topic has been gaining a lot of press as people begin to better understand and take control of their choices in the realm of diet.
TheCleanGreenLife.com, a website curating a daily digest about clean living, also recently published another element of emotional eating. The site's daily digest posts helpful info from all over the web and encourages conversation around health related topics.
TheCleanGreenLife.com posted an article talking about curbing comfort food cravings with heathy and raw foods that actually contribute nutrition and make people feel great. One of the site's curators, Emily Gill, created the post, which is quoted below.
"This article really hit home with me the other day. We have been in the process of unpacking all of our house after moving to a new place (translate: stress) and I was struck the with a craving for cookies. I remember staring at the cookies and thinking "if I eat these, I am going to feel like garbage in a half an hour. They will make me sleepy and I will loose all my motivation to keep unpacking." And wouldn't you know it, I ate them anyway....and felt just like I expected.
This article, even though it is talking about raw food, touches on a really important idea: the emotions we associate with food. It is a constant struggle to make choices for the right reasons, no matter what you are talking about, but food is a daily exercise in understanding the direct effects of our choices. Take a read and let me know what you think.
Is There Such Thing As Comfort Eating With Raw Foods?
Comfort eating refers to the consumption of food for reasons other than nutrition or good health, and it is something that most people experience at some point in life, most often without even realizing it. Virtually any craving is, in fact, an emotional reaction which dictates us to seek out a certain type of food. When experiencing stressful, negative emotions, out primal instinct is to find a quick way of replacing them with relaxing, positive feelings.
As we live in a world where we have virtually unlimited access to more food than ever before, comfort eating seems like an easy coping mechanism. Moreover, festive items such as cookies and salty chips are marketed as recreational snacks rather than actual foods, so we learn to unconsciously identify them as such, and crave them when we are upset, angry, or simply wanting to feel good. Some research suggests that comfort eating encourages the release of serotonin - the neurotransmitter responsible for boosting our mood. This means that before we know it, we are tangled in a vicious circle where the brain rewards us for eating something that is essentially unhealthy for us. Unfortunately, this reward is short lived, while the damage done by highly processed foods can take a substantial toll on our long term health. Nonetheless, the mechanism behind emotional eating is not bad per se, as it is what we learn to consume when we get emotional that makes us less healthy, overweight, depressed or infertile in the long run...
There is a lot more great info in this article and you can read the rest over at Raw Food Health Watch"
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