The Choice Not to Consciously Choose Food: Emotional Eating, Part One of a Series

The true reason we are supposed to eat is as mentioned in the Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chaim 231): "All your intentions should be for the sake of Heaven," alongside the physical aspect of the natural need to nourish the body.

In practice, these are not the only reasons we eat. Sometimes, our eating is not intended to meet physiological needs and nourish the body, but to address emotional needs. Such eating is defined as "emotional eating."

We don't always succeed in identifying the reason that causes us to eat, and especially: we don't always succeed in identifying the emotional factors that influence our eating.

We are not always aware, but in reality, we make dozens of unconscious decisions daily regarding food: what to eat? When? Where? How? How much? And many other questions of this kind, spread across all our encounters with food throughout the day. We may not ask or examine these options but simply act automatically, as if without exercising choice.

But a person does have choice. Even when they do not consciously use their ability to choose, it's a choice: the choice not to consciously choose.

This applies to all areas, including eating. A person has the ability to choose in all matters related to food, and if they become aware of this ability, they can make more informed and correct decisions for themselves. The problem begins when the person does not act out of choice but in an automatic way. In other words: when they choose not to choose. In this state, they are not aware of the different options available to them, as they operate under habits and embedded thought and behavior systems, with a sense of absolute security and without questioning them.

When we make decisions wisely, we can hope they serve us well. However, when we choose unwisely, through our system of emotions and habits, there's no guarantee that our choices will serve our goals. When it comes to nutrition, it can be said that a lack of conscious choice may affect the quality of the food we eat, its quantity, and many other parameters surrounding eating.

A person suffering from emotional eating, for instance, may consume large amounts of food, much beyond what other people eat, and far beyond what their body needs. These negative eating habits can lead to serious health issues, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart diseases, gallbladder diseases, chronic fatigue, and more.

Eating as an Escape

People are increasingly unsure of how to deal with emotions. It can even be said that people are afraid of emotions. They feel uncomfortable with emotions such as fear, panic, anxiety, boredom, frustration, disappointment, stress, and so forth, and since they do not know how to deal with these emotions, they try obsessively to distract themselves from these negative emotions by eating, often not healthily.

This escape allows those who have become accustomed to finding comfort in emotional eating to run away from confrontation and to suppress the problem. It substitutes the real and correct solution, which is: allowing oneself to experience the negative emotions directly and solve them.

Consider anger, for example: people feel anger when they experience a gap between reality and their expectations. For instance, a person wants their children to be more well-behaved than they are, and when they find that's not the case, they become angry, in response to the gap between reality and expectation. Here, instead of solving the issue and aligning expectations with real life, so that there is a match between the ideal and the real, they distract themselves with eating, allowing them to escape experiencing the anger emotion.

Similarly, when we are frustrated at work, unsuccessful in studies, or face challenges socially, we often turn to our 'personal therapist' found in everyone's kitchen: the refrigerator, which holds a variety of 'therapeutic tools': meat, dairy, parve, salty, sweet, and more...

Of course, this is not a confrontation and certainly not a solution. But indeed, for many people, eating allows an escape from facing difficult emotions, and it's a temptation they are not always able to resist.

Hunger That Knows No Satisfaction

If we seek to clarify what are the most significant causes of obesity, and what are the factors to deal with to achieve weight loss, most respondents will point to physiological factors, and mainly: hunger. Weight loss is perceived by most people as something that involves abstaining from meeting the body's physiological needs, in other words: self-starvation. However, the emotional factors will be given very little weight, if at all, by most respondents.

But in truth, in many cases, the situation is entirely different. Obesity does not stem only from physiological factors but also from emotional ones, and to break free from the cycle of obesity, one needs to learn how to better manage the world of emotions - to recognize the mechanism that triggers emotional eating, and discover how it can be neutralized. Only then can a significant change in the interaction between us and the food we consume be achieved.

Sometimes, the roots of this mechanism are already entrenched in infancy. An infant finds satisfaction for the need for calm and serenity, warmth, and affection, at the times when they receive food. In cases where the only times an infant receives their emotional needs are around food, it can create a conditioning between food and fulfilling emotional needs. It's as if the brain says to itself: the time I receive positive attention is only during meals.

Even in early childhood, many parents tend to connect food with pleasure, satisfaction, or consolation. For example, when the child succeeds in a test, they receive a treat, or conversely, when they cry, they are offered something sweet to forget the pain and calm down. Let's not forget that in festive and social events, as well as celebrations, food plays a central role, sometimes even serving as a measure of the event's success.

Thus, in our consciousness, food is perceived as having an impact on our emotional world. We carry this approach into our adult lives - accustomed to pampering ourselves with food, alleviating boredom with food, compensating for disappointments with food, and so forth.

Moreover, emotional eating often stems from an inability to experience positive experiences. When a person cannot internalize positive experiences and be filled by them, they remain empty afterward, prompting them to try to fill that void with food. It's as if the physical fullness is intended to replace emotional fulfillment.

To emphasize: if occasionally we feel the need to compensate ourselves with a good meal after a hard day, it is not catastrophic. But when this occurs regularly, it is a problem. When emotional needs overpower our nutritional dialogue, and emotional eating becomes a constant pattern, it poses a problem that can have severe consequences and must be resolved promptly. Because physical hunger can be satisfied, but emotional hunger knows no satisfaction ever!