Emotional Eating vs. Emotional Eating Disorders
I encourage periods of fasting because they can help a person feel in control of their state of health. This approach worked for me so I wanted to share my theories so that anyone who suffers from a similar type of eating disorder can benefit from how I overcame mine. And basically all I had to do was to stop feeling guilty. I told myself that calories don’t exist and I can eat whatever I want and because I wanted to eat something, on some level I needed it - either physically or emotionally. So basically I gave in to every craving big or small.
Are you brainwashed? The answer is most definitely yes. Because information changes your brain so any information you have ever come across has influenced the things you believe. Do you know what’s healthy and unhealthy? Most people have a general idea based on what the media tells us or what we hear from friends or any other stream of information. A good example of this is how 20 years ago fat was the enemy, and now we don’t generally believe that is true, but it sure changed the dietary habits of individuals from the generation who grew up hearing that fat is the enemy, and sometimes conditioning takes a long time to undo. Because even when we believe we believe something, subconsciously we may believe something totally different.
What influences your food choices? Most people have a reason for eating the foods they eat, and most of the time, at least part of the reason, is because you like that food. Do you ever eat things you hate? The answer is no. Because even if it doesn’t taste great, you still like it for some other reason. And that is true for every animal. Animals eat things they want to eat, not things they don’t! And so I believe that all of us innately know what we need. We know which foods will bring us the happiness and satisfaction that allows for mental and physical health and wellbeing. I also believe that we know the amount of food that our bodies need to be at our individual ideal. Do you ever stop eating before you feel like it? I used to do this constantly. It would last about a week or so, then I would binge on every food in sight, to the point that I would at times feel like I was on the verge of throwing up and once had a dream that my stomach exploded lol. But it really isn’t very funny because I know a lot of women especially who have experienced this disordered eating pattern of restriction followed by binging, then feeling so guilty afterwards that we restrict ourselves even more. This my friends is an eating disorder.
But I will tell you that from my personal experience the only thing I’ve had to do to overcome this type of emotional eating disorder and lose the weight I wanted to lose was to just eat until I felt like stopping, and not feel bad about it. And eat any food I wanted to. Seems too good to be true (and it is because I am now 100% vegan). I will say though that because I struggled with anorexia when I was younger the process brought up that emotional eating pattern as well. I felt really good about myself when I restricted food and saw I lost weight, so it can be challenging removing that aspect from a person’s psychology.
I also want to mention another type of eating disorder that I believe is becoming more and more prevalent in society, called orthorexia, in which a person is so concerned with being healthy that any food they consume that they don’t consider healthy, or even healthy foods that they believe may be causing them to have an immune response, results in a barrage of symptoms that can be debilitating. Orthorexia can also include the fear of not doing every possible thing to improve health, including supplementation with an endless number of health promoting ingredients. So don’t stop drinking your green smoothie, but if you decide that today you’d rather have a cheese omelet with toast it’s not the end of the world and if you wanted it, you must have needed it, so try not to feel guilty but honestly vegan is best!
Given this, I’m not saying you should eat a bag of chips every day, but I’m also saying that if you enjoy eating bags of chips sometimes, you can still do it and be totally healthy and fit. Everything in moderation, including moderation, as a friend of mine likes to say. Because the proof is in the pudding, so have your cake, and eat it too! Or don’t if that’s what makes you happiest :D And please go vegan as fast as possible, the entire planet is hurting @beeasyvegan on instagram and www.beeasyvegan.com