What is the connection between food and emotion?
For a compulsive overeater, anorexic or bulimic, eating is
attached to emotions. We are never fully satisfied, no matter how much we eat or
avoid eating, because we are eating for emotional reasons rather than physical
reasons. We eat for excitement, love, celebration, loneliness, escape, pleasure,
and comfort. We devour food, purge, or abort eating to anesthetize ourselves. We
eat out of anger, resentment, envy, jealousy, fear, pride, guilt, and grief. As
the problem worsens, and it always does because this is a progressive disease,
the self-destructive impact of overeating begins to far outweigh the temporary
pleasure or comfort that eating once brought. For the Anorexic, starvation
becomes a way of obtaining that "emotional high" The Bulimic feels that "rush
and relief" of the purge cycle. Eventually, some of us do this for so long that
we become addicted to an eating pattern for no apparent reason, even when the
pleasure has turn to pain.
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