Emotional Eating 101 pt 2 of 4

Emotional Eating 101 (Part 2 of 4)
by Roger Gould, M.D. In Part 1 of this series, we discussed emotional eating and hunger and how they compel people to eat. In this article, we are going to explore how emotional eating really is a symptom of food addiction.

Food Addiction
As we all know, dieting is the most common private approach to obesity and it just doesn't work. The last two decades there have been more people dieting and more diet programs yet obesity has increased over 20%. Dieting programs and fads have a 99% relapse rate. Their failures have been proved by many studies. And as we've said, the problem is not so much what you eat, but that you can't control how much you eat. This means that you're addicted to food.

This may sound harsh, but you have all the evidence you need. Do you struggle to control what you eat? Have you been overeating for years? Have you put your health at risk because of your eating habits? Does the idea of giving up food as comfort make you nervous? Have you tried to change your eating habits but failed? If you answered yes to any of these questions, it should be pretty obvious that you are addicted to food.

Many people ask at this point, "Aren't we all addicted to food?" In some sense, yes, everyone is addicted to food. Obviously we need to eat to survive, so in that sense we are always seeking enough to keep us healthy. That's the essential addiction common to all animals. The biological hunger drive is a basic survival mechanism, but that is not what we are talking about here.

When we say food addiction, we mean that you are compelled to overeat for reasons other than survival or health. You are not responding to the biological hunger drive. These other reasons fall in the domain of psychology. You may know some of them already, but you don't know all of them, or all of them well enough yet to break the addiction.

Food addiction comes in all sizes. In fact, you can use your weight as a rough measure. If you are overweight by one hundred pounds or more, that means food is so overly important to your mental equilibrium that you will sacrifice all your health to keep it as a coping mechanism. If you are twenty to fifty pounds overweight, you are probably very dependent on food, but realize that it's not the only way to handle life. If you just can't seem to lose those last 10 pounds, then you are on the other side of the spectrum and probably use food as a reward, but not too often.

But where does it come from? We all eat every day; so why do some of us become addicted and others don't? The potential for food addiction starts innocently at birth. When a mother feeds her baby, the baby stops crying. Babies equate the mother's milk—food-with survival, love, and peace of mind. Even a pacifier, which has no warmth, taste or nutritional value, is close enough to that primal experience to soothe the infant. It's normal to be addicted to your mother's soothing function as an infant, and easy enough to make food the pathway back to that comforting state of mind.
As adults, we all continue to use food as a tranquilizer from time to time. But some people begin to overuse this method of coping and, little by little, it becomes the preferred way of dealing with problems. Using food to cope can get out of control when food is constantly seen as a source of comfort and tranquility. It's okay to eat for sustenance, for the love of food, and even—in moderation—to fend off a blue mood or to give ourselves a reward. But there is a big difference between occasionally using food to fix our moods and compulsively overeating as our primary coping mechanism to deal with the stress and strain of daily life. When someone overeats on a daily basis, it's almost certain that they are addicted to food. The addiction matures slowly over life, but it's not entirely clear why some of people get addicted while others don't.

The worst part about it is that overeating works. It really is a powerful way to temporarily change the whole state of your mind. If you are anxious, eating can rid you of anxiety. It can give you time to regroup. Some people have described how eating puts them into their own bubble, and makes all the worries go away for a while. Others have described a state of feeling insulated and protected instead of vulnerable and raw. When you are addicted, eating has become a way to silence your mind whenever it presents you with ideas or images you'd rather not deal with. In that sense, it does work; it temporarily banishes uncomfortable thoughts and the feelings associated with them. And when you are addicted to this feeling, you have very little control over how much you eat.

If all this is true, and emotional eating is a sign of food addiction, and if you are really addicted to food, does that mean you have no control over what you eat? That's the interesting dilemma. You always have a choice. It is definitely you who lifts the fork to your mouth or buys the cheeseburger when you just finished telling yourself you were going to watch it and lose some weight. You may make the right choice sometime, but when day after day and year after year you make the decision to overeat (which I define simply as eating much more than you need to stay in caloric balance), you will have to admit that you are acting like a person who is compelled to do something that you have consciously decided not to do. There is no way around this unless you tell me that you want to overeat and you don't want to control your weight.

In most cases, however, this compulsion to overeat sets up a very painful process. It makes people feel weak and out of control and actually afraid to commit themselves to another diet because they are certain they will not be able to defeat this adversary.
I have heard the inside story of this struggle for decades from patients I have seen. So often I have heard people describe their relationship with food exactly like an addiction. I'll take you through a few examples to let you get an inside look.

Several years ago, I asked Mary, a 35-year-old married mother of two, what it would be like if she finally succeeded in controlling her weight. She said, "I would be on top of the world. Last year I lost about 65 pounds and I was a totally different person. I could wear really cool clothes instead of the dreaded plus-sized fashions. I didn't hate what I saw in the mirror—it was a stranger looking back at me, but one that I had admired from afar. I was able to get off my blood pressure medication as well. But somehow I knew it was only temporary, because of my lifelong battle with fat. It started with a donut—one donut—and then I would eat three or four at a sitting, especially when my boss was cranky; donuts were my salvation. Now, I hate to buy clothes. I'm back on medication, my knees ache, and I am feeling tired and hopeless again."

Mary had strong motivations to change but her goals were thwarted by her dependence on food as a source of comfort. When I asked Mary to give herself a positive vision of her future to keep her weight loss efforts on track, she was hesitant to even describe what success might feel like. "My fear of failure is like a ghost in my life … chasing me around every day."

We have to look below the surface to understand what's really eroding Mary's confidence. Her personal secret is that she doesn't believe she can actually give up food as her best friend when she is distressed. She's locked in a vicious cycle and she needs help. While she doesn't look like an addict, she is one. Her addiction is legal, socially acceptable—even encouraged—but it's no less destructive than the addictions that have been outlawed or so stigmatized as to become unpopular.

In countless stories similar to this one, I have come to understand the pull of the addiction to food. It didn't surprise me at all to hear one patient say she felt there was a "demon" inside of her tempting her towards food. For many people, their emotional eating habit is so strong they don't believe they can ever break it. Instead, they try to work around it.

For example, Norman was thin when he was younger because he ran four miles each morning, rain or shine, to justify his enormous appetite. Food was the only thing that calmed his anxiety, but he knew he had to compensate for his overeating to stay trim. If he had a fight with his wife, he would stuff himself at dinner, and then just go out and jog another few miles. But after a knee injury, Norman couldn't run anymore. Twenty years later, Norman is 55 and very overweight, and he no longer exercises at all.

Jan's story is similar. Early in her marriage, Jan was bulimic. She would eat two dinners and the better part of a cake every evening. Friends marveled at her ability to stay thin. What they didn't see was what she did when Jan was finished stuffing herself, she would find a private place and force herself to throw up. As soon as she was finished, she promised herself never to do it again, but the next time she found herself binging, she had to purge to make up for it. Jan was fortunate enough to find people who could help her beat bulimia. Millions more are not that lucky. Bulimia is their way of compensating for their primary addiction to food. They can't give up their insatiable need for food, so they control their weight through vomiting, tearing up their insides in the process.

Emotional eaters have become dependent on food to survive the challenges of daily life. There's no other way to explain their behavior or craving. They are addicted to food as much as an alcoholic to alcohol, a smoker to smoking, or an addict to drugs. They don't think they can make it without this handy non-prescription tranquilizer, and they're fearful of trying to do so. In that sense, overeating has become a mental compulsion. It's not that they really want to overeat, but that they are compelled to overeat. This sometimes-useful coping mechanism is transformed into a compulsion because it works so well, but only for a short time. That means that every time they are distressed, they automatically generate an image in their head of which food will make them feel better. These activated images of relief are there to tempt them until they're satisfied. That's how a compulsion works.

Unless an emotional eater finds a new way to make peace with his or her distress warnings, the unconscious compulsion to overeat will win out time and time again. It will win no matter how motivated and disciplined the dieters consider themselves. Even those who succeed in losing weight for a year or more find this strange inner opponent coming back to claim yet another victory after they hit a stressful patch in their life. Until food addiction is broken and the emotional eating pattern under control, weight loss is impossible.

Now that you've read this article and thought about it a little, it's time for you to personally evaluate how it applies to your life. Below are some questions and discussion topics that will be the focus of the discussion for this article.

1. Try to pinpoint the times when you were tempted to break your diet or overeat. What were the main causes? Were you anxious or angry? How about depressed or stressed? If you do ate during these times, how specifically did it make you feel? Content or safe? Numb or detached? How many distinct patterns can you identify?
2. Beside emotional eating patterns, what evidence for food addiction can you find in your life? Your weight might be one piece of evidence, but there is probably more if you think about it. Try to think of at least a few things besides your weight that show food addiction plays a major part in your life.
   Hint: In what ways have you acted in the past that might seem strange to someone who didn't suffer from food addiction?
3. You undoubtedly have positive motivations to lose weight. What are these positive motivations? Try describing what you would feel like if you reached your target weight. After you're done, ask yourself why these motivations aren't strong enough to carry you to success?