Hunger is the driving force for what we do in life and how we live it. We hunger for food, but just as much we hunger for love, sex, peace, relationships, justice, approval, wealth, advancement, and more. And during times when we are lacking in one of the areas where we hunger, we tend toward the most basic hunger of all, for food, and we eat. We eat our stress, our lovelessness, our worries, our fears, our boredom—and as a result food becomes our friend and a potential enemy. We may begin to pack on the pounds and possibly stir up internal trouble, such as heart disease, diabetes, and other food-related conditions.
Until recently I did not have a real relationship to food. I was a very skinny kid, and food was never on my mind. I would skip meals, and sometimes I would eat anything just to get it over with.
But as I have aged, all this has changed. I have become one of the biggest foodies I know, and I think about food all the time. As I become more sedentary and less likely to spend evenings out, I can relate to those who eat out of boredom or because there is something lacking in their lives. Food has actually become one of my few remaining pleasures. I realize that most of what I do when I go out involves food: dinner and a movie or a play, meeting a friend or business associate for lunch, grocery shopping and cooking, a movie and popcorn, a jazz club with dinner, having guests over for dinner, going to a friend’s for a dinner party. I cannot think of an event I was involved in over the past year that did not include a meal.
When I’m home alone, I tend to open the refrigerator or the kitchen cabinet repeatedly in a short span of time, looking for food that doesn’t exist—thinking that this time I will find something desirable. Many times nothing calls to me, but I’ll eat something anyhow.
As I write this I’m munching on Organic O’s cereal because I like the crunch and I don’t have the desire to cook or the time to go out to eat. My son visited me today and packed up most of the food I had in the cabinets and refrigerator—as a young’un on his own would do. And that’s OK with me.
Although everything I mentioned above is about food, it really isn’t about food. It’s about our lives being unfulfilled, a sense that something is lacking. I have come to realize that much of our eating is emotional eating for one reason or another—for pleasure or to fill up the emptiness. This is what I call brain-based or psychological eating. Other people may call it eating out of boredom or stress eating.
My friend Dr. Wendy, the psychologist, says emotional eating means you are soothing yourself and trying to feed your soul at the same time. So today I am actually writing about how the brain calls upon food to fulfill desires. Food is one of the few things we can control when we are starving for something else. Paradoxically, it also becomes difficult to control when we decide to change our eating habits, lose weight, or cut out favorite foods in order to achieve optimal health.
I first learned about the importance of the foods we eat from my then-husband, a doctor who was also a nutritionist, with whom I co-wrote weight loss cookbook. Subsequently, I became a certified health coach specializing in nutrition. I learned how the brain responds to certain foods from Wendy, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is a professor of brain and behavioral science. She told me that the release of the brain chemical dopamine is associated with pleasure and fulfillment. We experience this when we are enjoying our food. To this I would add that sometimes one can enjoy food a little too much, eat too much, and then feel guilty. I think we all understand the guilt part.
Wendy suggests rewiring your brain if you want to lose weight. She says, “A healthy and happy brain helps maintain a healthy weight.” She believes it’s more than harnessing willpower; it’s about understanding why eating feels so good and why not eating what you want hurts so much. Wendy believes we can actually train our brains to have more control over what we eat and thus lose weight. She directs her patients to purge negative self-talk in order to retrain the brain when they want to change their eating habits.
Wendy believes diets generally fail because of the painful physical and mental state of deprivation while dieting. She points out that many people are emotional eaters at some point in their lives and others for most of their lives. She believes the right question to ask yourself is what are you really starving for?
Negative thoughts about oneself and uncomfortable feelings cause motivation to evaporate. If you’re trying to lose weight, such feelings can cause you to gain back all the weight lost and often put on additional pounds. The lower brain and the limbic system are concerned with feeling good emotionally and physically. Also, according to Wendy, depriving yourself of the food you love feels like losing a parent or a lover. Deprivation feels a lot like pain, loss, and even fear about the future.
Wendy believes that in order to lose weight for good you must get your higher brain involved. She agrees with Deepak Chopra, M.D.—she favors his term “awareness eating,” and recognizes this is a necessary component to permanent weight loss. Wendy also believes that the path to healthy eating is to become aware of what you eat, think, and feel. Learning new habits helps to defeat the triggers that undermine diets. The higher brain is involved in being happy with the choices you make. Will power is necessary not only for dieting but also in counter-conditioning negative thoughts produced by habit, past failures, and the idea that impulse control is impossible. Media images and peer and family pressure cannot direct your every mood and thought about yourself.
So, in my opinion, it’s not always about weight loss. It’s about all the losses we sustain in life.
Wendy, by the way, is naturally slender. The other day we met for lunch, and she was eating some deep-fried orange chicken that I refused to eat because it was fried. She was talking about a problem she was having, and I must have been bad company because I was focused on watching her eat something I consider poisonous. She enjoyed it anyway because she knows how to train the brain to ignore people like me, so that we don’t take a bite out of their pleasure of eating! Even therapists have to fill up when something is lacking. Dr. Wendy would say to feed your soul first.
And about those Organic O’s I mentioned earlier, I have just now inhaled half a box of them. They are reminiscent of Cheerios, but a healthy version. I notice the round “O” cereals all have a hole in the middle. I wonder if psychologists would think they were designed like that, with an empty space to be filled in for some deep-seated reason. You get the picture, right? I think I’ll ask Wendy.
Enjoy!
Sherry Plum
Now for two recipes that will feed your soul without making you feel guilty:
