Emotional eating during emotional times

By Sonia Salfity
Desperate Dieter

• Unrest, anxiety, anger and fear can take a huge toll on our health and well-being. If we’re not cautious, this can easily wreak havoc on our emotional state. It becomes way too easy to reach for comfort foods to soothe our angst

The problem with emotional eating is that the comfort it offers is short-lived. It’s a temporary fix that doesn’t fix anything and its long-term damage is exponential. It causes a downward spiral and affects our mental health and our ability to think clearly.

Mental fog is not pleasant especially when we  need to function at an optimal level to take care of  our many responsibilities. Like it or not, we must  face the truth that, for every moment of emotional overeating, we pay the price tenfold. We also become a burden to those around us when we eventually are unable to take care of ourselves.

Self-care and wellbeing 

When we don’t take the necessary steps to properly care for our wellbeing, we become bitter, angry, short-tempered and depressed. 

We already have these problems in the world all around us so why would we want to add more to our anxiety?

We can’t control what other people do nor can we control the political unrest around us. However, we  can certainly control how we respond. We always have a choice. 

We can respond more sensibly and thoughtfully, using words to describe our emotions and sharing them with a trusted friend. 

This helps us process through our feelings in a healthy manner instead of internalising them only to watch them explode when we least suspect it. The more words we add to our vocabulary to describe how we are feeling, the better we can become at expressing ourselves.

Our wheel of words 

It turns out there is an entire wheel of words to express our varied emotions. And here, I thought we could just be sad, mad or glad: words like overwhelmed, astonished, vulnerable, frustrated and confused, just to name a few.

Here is the link to a printable wheel of emotions you can print and share with your family.

I think it’s especially important to share it with our children because this is not something we learned to do well when we were their age.

It’s essential to mirror good ways to process conflict and unrest so that our children grow up having this ability. This takes practice.

We may never get perfect at it, but we can certainly get better at this. I suggest having certain phrases that you can tell yourself to anchor you when you feel things are out of control: Statements like “I can’t change this, but I can choose how to respond to it.”

Sometimes the best thing is not to respond at all and to allow enough time to pass before we decide how to respond in a thoughtful and intelligent manner, that is powered by wisdom and insight and not fuelled by raging anger.

Self-respect and life choices

This gives us sacred time for an opportunity to make better life-giving choices with respect for ourselves and others regardless of the circumstances.

It will also do us well to remember that we must be cautious about reacting angrily on social media because anger and rage spread like fire without accomplishing anything of substance.

Nothing good ever comes out of verbal vomit whether it’s online or in person. You cannot take back things once they’re said and they only serve to create more distance. Instead of feeding our anger, let’s feed our souls with wholesome, well-thought matters of substance that quieten our anxieties instead of exacerbating them.

Here’s to health, inner peace and wellbeing despite the diabolical political and economic storms that surround us. 

May we end this year with a renewed determination to leave behind the thoughts that don’t serve us well, and to recapture a new vision that has at its core our best interest and the interests of everyone around us.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine