Food is a basic need so eating is an activity which is essential for survival. The body’s fundamental trigger for eating is hunger. Hunger pangs tell your body that you need to replenish on fuels to keep your energy. The basic premise is you eat when you are hungry.

However, we do not just eat when we are hungry. Food has also become a form of comfort, reward, celebration and relief of stress. Eating different kinds of food helps satisfy feelings other than hunger. This kind of behaviour is called emotional eating.

Downing a pint of ice cream or craving for sweets when are feeling down is an example of this.

Using food to satisfy your emotional need is not necessarily a bad thing. But if emotional eating becomes a habit or a primary coping mechanism, it could be detrimental to your health. When you reach out for food each time you feel upset, bored, stressed or lonely, emotional eating becomes a lifestyle which can be hard to deal with. You will definitely feel (and see) the effect on your body sooner or later.

Emotional eating is a temporary feel-good solution. The satisfied feeling you get from food does not last long but the feelings that triggered your eating does. The worst part is, you are packing up unnecessary calories and loading your body with junk while not being able to solve the underlying problems that cause your emotional eating.

Emotional eating is something to be addressed before you get stuck to it. Next thing you know you are not just dealing with messed up emotions from your problems but weight and health issues have caught up with you too