Food For Feelings

How you feed your feelings can have a direct impact on your wellbeing. Often, emotional hunger has less to do with a rumbling stomach and more to do with nourishing your mind.

- Carrol Baker

You have a brand-new mortgage and your work hours are cut, your partner has cancelled a weekend away and the dishwasher has just flooded the kitchen. Before you reach for a handful of cookies or that brie calling you from the fridge, get curious about the motivation behind it.

Are you really hungry?

Why do we eat if it’s not for sustenance to fuel our bodies? To fill a need? For something to do? Because we’re happy, sad, tired or afraid? Turns out it can be all of the above.

Dr Michelle May, author of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat, says that by asking the simple question “Am I hungry?” you open the door to a deeper awareness and understanding of yourself. “Once inside, there’s much to explore. You see it’s not just about what you eat; it’s also about why and how you eat. In fact, for many, it’s not about food at all,” she writes.

People eat when they aren’t hungry for myriad reasons. At a friend’s party, canapés are handed around and it seems rude not to try one. Enjoying a crunchy toffee apple at a school fete takes some people back to their childhood. A mum unconsciously nibbles leftover food on her child’s plate. Lovers savour the intimacy of a shared ice-cream in a park as they enjoy the sweet sunshine.

Then there’s eating as a coping mechanism, a way to deal with emotions. Natasha Murray, accredited practising dietitian and spokesperson for the Dietitians Association of Australia, says emotional eating is a complex issue.

“It happens when we eat in an effort to satisfy feelings, not hunger,” she says. “People use food as a coping strategy for negative emotions such as stress, anxiety or boredom.”