Are You An Emotional Overeater?

Meredith reaches for the last potato chips in the bag and she wonders not only how she could have finished the whole bag but also why she started to eat the  chips when she wasn’t even hungry. Does this happen to you? Do you find yourself munching your way through a whole heap of snacks when you weren’t even hungry? Could there be other reasons aside from hunger that cause you overeat?.

Physical versus Emotional Hunger

Everyone knows the perception of physical hunger. We get light-headed, our stomachs start to gurgle and have that empty feeling. However, many people can no longer differentiate between the physical hunger in their stomachs and emotional hunger in their psyches. Food is used as a cover-up for emotions like boredom, loneliness, anger and sadness.

According to Nan Kathryn Francis, author of “Overcoming the legacy of Overeating”, many people overeat because they confuse hunger for food with their hunger for emotional fulfillment. People are not aware that they are using food as a coping mechanism for underlying feelings. “The more we abuse the food and use it as tranquilizer, the more we learn to live in a state of denial”. We tune out, turn away, avoid, and forget the underlying problem. Finally we forget we have forgotten and blame weight and eating habits for every thing that’s gone wrong with our lives.