http://positivetranceformations.com.au/blog/comfort-eating-what-it-is-and-isnt/ Several factors are involved in the link between food and emotions: the historical two-way association between abundance and good times, the way low blood sugar affects our mood, and childhood experiences. Being aware of the reasons why you’re eating is often the first step to distinguishing comfort eating from genuine celebration and from the good feelings that come from satisfying actual hunger.

1. Comfort Eating – What It Is
And Isn’t

2. One thing you often become aware of in
the field of hypnotherapy is that there is
a strong link between the emotions and
the way we eat.

3. In fact, one of the areas that hypnosis is
often used for is in the area of weight
loss.

4. Often, comfort eating is cited as being
an issue lying behind somebody’s
weight problem.

6. The link between feeling good and the
food we eat is undeniable. It’s just part
of being human.

7. However, it’s important to be aware as
to exactly what comfort eating is and
what it isn’t.

8. If comfort eating is a problem for
you, then being aware of what’s going
on will help you have power over it and
feel more in control.

9. Knowing what comfort eating
isn’t can also be helpful.

10. Factor one: good times and
abundance

11. Having an abundance of food was a
reason to celebrate and be happy.

12. On the other hand, a big life event such
as a birth, a marriage or even a
death, was celebrated or
commemorated by lavish amounts of
food.

13. Now, it’s not comfort eating to enjoy
eating a bit of birthday cake at your
friend’s party, even though eating the
cake will be associated with feeling
happy and will be part of the general fun
of the celebration.

14. The problem here comes when you try
to capture the feeling associated with a
party by eating party food even when
you’re not celebrating anything – that
is comfort eating.

15. Factor two: blood sugar

16. There is also a physical side to the
link between food and emotions.

17. When we are low on blood sugar and
hungry, we tend to feel pretty terrible.

18. It varies from person to person, but
when we haven’t eaten for a while, we
get grumpy, snappy, more prone to
worry, a bit more emotional and prone to
tearfulness and so forth.

19. Any mother of small children – in
fact, any parent at all – can tell you that
the time of day that’s the worst is the
hour just before the evening meal.

20. All that irritability is simply a sign that
your body needs some fuel, while some
of the worry that kicks in may be, deep
down, part of a fear that there will not be
enough to eat.

21. This emotional factor should drive us to
grab something to eat – it’s like the fuel
light coming on in the car to show that
we’re low on fuel.

22. Where comfort eating comes in is when
we use food as a way to help us feel
better when we feel
tired, irritable, stressed or upset for
some other reason, i.e. when hunger
isn’t the cause of our bad
temper and anxiety.

23. The classic example here is the
stereotype of a woman who has been
dumped by her lover and who turns to
ice cream and chocolate as a
consolation – eating her heart out. Men
do it too, of course!

24. If you think you like comfort
eating, well, stop it now with the help of
a Hypnotherapist Gold Coast.

25. More information at
http://positivetranceformations.com.au