Are you hungry all the time? Perhaps your body is claiming some nutrient that it lacks. A nutrient that has nothing to do with your diet, but with your most emotional part.
There are people who think they are hungry all the time. However, this sensation is not always satisfied with food, since it does not always have to do with it. Often a voracious and disproportionate intake is rather associated with emotional deficiencies, such as a lack of love from others or towards oneself.
Far from obtaining nutrients being the only reason why people eat, there are many other valid reasons, although not all of them are equally healthy. Yes, human beings eat to satisfy the basic need of hunger, but also to calm some emotions and intensify others.
We eat to celebrate, to say goodbye, to close cycles. Also for happiness, sadness, fear, anxiety and boredom. We eat because our partner doesn’t reply to a message on WhatsApp, because we haven’t felt the warmth of a big hug for a long time or because we can’t look at ourselves with compassionate eyes through the mirror. Yes, love and hunger seem to go hand in hand.
Signs of love
When we are born we are given nutrients and love through the same thing: food. At that time, the fact that our mother, father or person who cares for us provides us with food also means a sign of love, support and protection. We are nurtured organically and emotionally from breast milk or a bottle, which is often accompanied by caresses, aromas, loving words and soft melodies.
Providing food for a baby is one of the most sincere acts of love that you can experience. Whoever receives it will feel protected and safe. If his physiological and symbolic needs are being satisfied, when he grows up he will have the possibility of becoming someone capable of giving love to other people and to himself. On the other hand, if the necessary quota of love is not covered, he may try to fill that gap through what makes him feel instantly protected: food.
We believe that this way the feeling of sadness or anguish will disappear, but what really happens is that it is only anesthetized for a moment. As we can see, it is not so far-fetched to think that confusing hunger for food with hunger for love is quite reasonable.
Are you eating your emotions?
Hunger is not synonymous with lack of love, but they do tend to come close. Often, a lack of affection translates into an excess of food. That time you raided the pantry at three in the morning looking for something sweet, maybe what you really needed was a hug. Perhaps you needed someone to listen to you the followingnoon that, following work, you binge. Is it possible that you try to mitigate the feeling of loneliness when you eat large volumes of food?
Compulsive eating is a behavior that can end up becoming habitual, and can become a serious problem such as an eating disorder. In turn, it can be a warning regarding unpleasant and dysfunctional emotional states. The compulsion often arises in response to feeling desperately alone, misunderstood, or abandoned.
The truth is that it has happened to all of us at some point to seek well-being in the wrong place. Well, food cannot hurt us, nor set limits on us, nor reject us, nor get angry with us, people can.
“Compulsion is despair on the emotional level. The substances, people or activities that make us behave compulsively are those that we believe can free us from despair. Geneen Roth –
love is out of the fridge
Now, how to distinguish if it is appropriate to look in the fridge or outside of it? The answer is this: by differentiating our need for food from our need for love. Or better called, physiological hunger and emotional hunger.
The first is regulated by the homeostatic system, which is responsible for keeping energy and nutrients in balance within our body. Instead, emotional hunger is regulated by the hedonic system that is associated with the repetition of certain behaviors as a means of obtaining pleasure. In addition, there are some differential characteristics that can help us distinguish between physiological and emotional hunger.
Now yes. Once we have detected that hunger has to do with the emotional world, we can try to satisfy it intelligently. Emotional hunger often hides a deeper meaning: the need to accept ourselves. To love us To treat us with kindness.
The feeling of emptiness and personal dissatisfaction often wears the guise of hunger. That is when we choose to consume quickly and unconsciously what we believe will make us feel better.
In turn, the hunger for self-love not only affects the diet, but also our social attitude. What does this mean? That if we feel dissatisfied with who we are, we may tend to demand from others that love that we feel we lack. In this case, we would be approaching the rest of the people from the need and not from the choice.
The importance of looking at yourself
As much as the people who accompany us have every intention of “healing” our lack of self-acceptance, they will hardly be able to: their attempts to fill our shortcomings will not be enough, because the emptiness belongs only to those who carry it inside. Neither the excess of food nor the excessive desire to be loved will be enough to calm a hunger for love.
In this sense, the proposal is that, if we feel lacking in affection, we start by looking at ourselves with different eyes. Although interpersonal bonds represent a fundamental part of well-being, self-love is essential. How regarding you work to cultivate it?
Source: The Mind is Wonderful.
