Contents
How to know if you are emotionally hungry or eat with your head
Psychology
Using food to modulate emotions, eating in a disorderly and capricious way and binge eating are some of the signs that indicate that we do not eat correctly
Just “a sigh” ago (evolutionarily speaking) we had to invest a lot of time and energy in getting food, either going hunting, or fishing or gathering. However, today we can have a ready-to-eat menu at the click of a button and without getting up from the sofa. The question is, as Javier Quintero, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist expert in cognition, explains, that the context has changed in all this time that has passed, but in reality the brain has not had time to adapt to those changes.
To this must be added the fact that the information that comes to us on how to improve diet, control weight and maintain health offers, according to Quintero, partial solutions to complex problems and even focuses on holding third parties responsible (legislators, advertising , environment….) of our difficulty to acquire healthy habits, thus weighing down the individual capacity for change. “We have forgotten that we are primarily responsible for our body and that we can do a lot on a day-to-day basis to improve and take care of it. That of waiting for something alien to us to change us, or for a miraculous action to appear that achieves incredible transformations in record time is not going to happen, I’m sorry, “he says.
The good news, according to Quintero, is that knowing how we eat and passing this behavior to a plane conscious, we can change the way we relate to food. “Not only do we have to change what we eat, but, above all, we should improve how we eat“, reveals.
Am I emotionally hungry?
Our diet, like many other behaviors of the human being, is regulated and influenced by emotions and other psychological aspects. This has led the psychiatrist Javier Quintero to study this aspect for more than 15 years, mainly in overweight people. The research has resulted in a 5-dimensional model, called «EAT-ID (Emotional, Addictive, Traumatic, Impulsive and Disorganized) », Which explains what the relationship with food is like.
Thus, according to this model, when our way of eating is not correct it is because one (or some) of these dimensions is interfering with our way of eating.
One of the possibilities is that we use the food to try to modulate our emotions. This happens, for example, when we eat more than necessary or specific foods when we are sad or when we are nervous. A representative case in this sense can be that of the fictional character of Bridget Jones, who was wiping her tears by eating a pot of ice cream after a breakup. Without the need for specific situations, this can lead us to confuse emotional hunger with physiological hunger.
There may also be situations in which what prevails is the disorganization in eating, which includes behaviors such as skipping meals, snacking between meals, or lightly following “I eat anything.” They are ways of relating to food that, according to the expert, make it difficult to maintain a balanced and healthy diet.
Another relevant behavior is giving Binge (eat more food than we had planned, do it almost without hunger and then feel bad about it). Raiding the fridge at untimely hours or eating in an orderly manner almost always, but breaking all the rules on weekends are behaviors that do not have as much to do with willpower as we believe, but with our relationship with food, according to the Coco Eating expert.
For other people their relationship with food is dependence, so we would be talking about a addictive behavior with characteristics similar to those that can be had with tobacco. “They tend to be capricious in the way they eat, they cannot resist the temptation to eat specific foods, and they even trigger their desire to consume certain foods, until they finally eat them, to reactivate the behavior of course”, describes the expert.
Self-knowledge is the key
To modify these behaviors the first step is to get to know yourself better. Not in vain, as Quintero explains, the basis of any change inexorably passes by knowing that I have to change. The ideal is to have professional guidance both to know what our relationship with food is like and to know what needs to be changed and how it can be done. In this sense, Javier Quintero’s team has developed through an app the slow, progressive and analytical method “Coco Eating”, which focuses on analyzing the “how I eat” based on the aforementioned model, “EAT-ID (Emotional, Addictive, Traumatic, Impulsive and Disorganized). ”