By Diane Ngo
Whenever I had been sad, I ate a tub of chocolate ice cream on my own and it really helped with what I was feeling. Why did it help?
The result is called emotional eating. It’s the body’s way of using food to help deal with stress or in an effort to satisfy the emotional needs.
Whenever I’m sad, or whenever my hormones are imbalanced, the taste and feel of ice cream is just so satisfying. It just suppresses my emotions, and it feels incredibly good. It was addicting.
A specific moment when I found out that I was emotionally eating, it was at a young age. I was about 7 and there was a vocab quiz that I had to study for. The studying was heavy, for a 7 year old, but that made me eat a bag of Doritos the night before the big day. There’s something soothing about crunching into a chip, chewing it furiously. It’s like eating your stress away.
Something that helped me to minimize eating an excess of calories is when I noticed how I was starting to feel unhealthy. Such as, my weight began to gain rapidly, my skin got worse, I didn’t have energy for anything. I now prevent myself from overeating by simply chewing gum. That way, I won’t eat 500 calories in one sitting due to some test or a presentation that would be worrying me out.
In the end, I learned that emotional eating isn’t healthy for the body but it sure is a good escape for stress to be released.
Whenever I had been sad, I ate a tub of chocolate ice cream on my own and it really helped with what I was feeling. Why did it help?
The result is called emotional eating. It’s the body’s way of using food to help deal with stress or in an effort to satisfy the emotional needs.
Whenever I’m sad, or whenever my hormones are imbalanced, the taste and feel of ice cream is just so satisfying. It just suppresses my emotions, and it feels incredibly good. It was addicting.
A specific moment when I found out that I was emotionally eating, it was at a young age. I was about 7 and there was a vocab quiz that I had to study for. The studying was heavy, for a 7 year old, but that made me eat a bag of Doritos the night before the big day. There’s something soothing about crunching into a chip, chewing it furiously. It’s like eating your stress away.
Something that helped me to minimize eating an excess of calories is when I noticed how I was starting to feel unhealthy. Such as, my weight began to gain rapidly, my skin got worse, I didn’t have energy for anything. I now prevent myself from overeating by simply chewing gum. That way, I won’t eat 500 calories in one sitting due to some test or a presentation that would be worrying me out.
In the end, I learned that emotional eating isn’t healthy for the body but it sure is a good escape for stress to be released.