Eat to live, not live to eat

We all eat to live in order to survive, because if we stop eating, we would die. Hence to avoid this fate, we all eat good food & drink enough water. However, nowadays there has been a new prevalent fashion of ‘live to eat’ that’s getting rampant in society. This new concept has nothing to do with our biological survival. Those who indulge in this do it because of some other reason outside of simply staying alive. In short, eating to live is a biological understanding whereas, living to eat is psychological, social, and emotional disorder that needs an urgent attention because emotional and disordered eating can wreak havoc on our mental, emotional, and physical health if left unaddressed, and, not to mention, the massive amount of time and energy it takes up, leaving one much less able to focus on what really matters in his/her life.

For most of us, emotional eating has become a habit of comfort – in other words, it’s a behaviour induced by certain cues like situations, feelings, people, commercials, etc. Scientific studies done over the years reveal that animals & people that were more stressed ended up eating more and getting fatter. In general, most of us consider emotional eating as a food addiction, just like we consider shopping, gambling, and other behaviours as addictions. There is no doubt that these behaviours can sometimes seem to take on a life of their own and make you feel like you’re just going along for a scary ride. But are they all the same? Well! they do seem like addictions on the surface, and it may be handy to use the term as a metaphor. But there’s an important difference, and hence using the term addiction to describe behavioral disorders that are not physical addictions tends to blur that distinction. We need to understand the difference that emotional eating and other behaviors are compulsions, not addictions.

A compulsion is something you feel you have to do; an addiction is something you can’t live without. Emotional eating, therefore, is a psychological compulsion to do something that would otherwise cause emotional distress, not physical withdrawal. The force that drives the behaviour, is the need to counteract feeling controlled by certain external forces by acting out against those or other external forces. The goal is to even one’s perception of the playing field in the ongoing tension between external demands and internal autonomy. Learning to recognize your emotional eating triggers is the first step to breaking free from food cravings and compulsive overeating, and changing the habits that have sabotaged our diets in the past.

Using food from time to time as a reward, or to celebrate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But, when eating becomes our primary emotional coping mechanism & when our first impulse is to open the refrigerator whenever we get upset, angry, lonely, stressed, exhausted, or bored, we get stuck in an unhealthy cycle where the real feeling or problem is never addressed. Remember! emotional hunger can’t be filled with food, Never Ever! Eating may feel good in weak moments, but the feelings that triggered the eating would be still hiding within. So, it’s better to target those hidden feelings rather than turning on to un-necessary & extra eating. If you don’t know how to manage your emotions in a way that doesn’t involve food, you won’t be able to control your eating habits for very long. Most emotional eaters feel powerless over their food cravings. When the urge to eat hits, it’s all one can think about. You feel an almost unbearable tension that demands to be fed, right now! Because you’ve tried to resist in the past and failed, you believe that your willpower just isn’t up to snuff. But the truth is that you have more power over your cravings than you think. Don’t tell yourself you can’t give in to the craving; remember, the forbidden is extremely tempting. So just try to put off eating for five minutes, or maybe one minute. While you’re waiting, check in with yourself. How are you feeling? What’s going on emotionally? After this process, even if you end up eating, you’ll have a better understanding of why you did it. This can help you set yourself up for a different response next time.

Psychologists who have examined patients with eating disorders found that those who were taught how to meditate had lower levels of relapse and more positive outcomes after release than those who received only conventional diet or nutrition treatments. Hence it would not be difficult to recognise the value of Meditation for elimination of the habit of stress eating and introduce this theory and practise as a subject in Education so that the youth & children can be saved from this fatal disorder which is more prevalent among them. Remember! Calming the mind for a few minutes may provide the distance needed to make a reasonable and healthy decision about whether to eat a chocolate cake or go in for a meditation session.

(Writer is a spiritual educator&popular columnist for publications across India,Nepal & UK. Till Date 8500+ Published Columns have been written by Him)