Emotional eating is normal behavior.  We don’t need to feel bad about it; find out WHY it happens; or stop doing it.

Here at DietHobby, (See Archives from March 18, 2016 through April 6, 2016 - first one: Here ), I  Scrapbooked a series of silent gif images, mostly film clips with superimposed dialogue about food and eating, in order to illustrate the fact that our bodies are designed to make Eating Food involve our Emotions. 

It isn’t accurate to define our eating behaviors as “emotional”  or  “physical.”  The process of Eating Food, …including our Food Choices…, is BOTH physical and emotional,  in differing degrees and combinations. 

Everything we eat affects us physically AND emotionally.  All food affects our blood sugar and gives us sensual pleasure …makes us feel good.  Like all other body processes that are designed to make us feel good, it’s impossible to separate food from emotion. 

Food is not “just fuel”, just like sex is not “just reproduction”.  The body’s relationship with food, like the body’s relationship with sex, is interwoven, and driven by both physical and emotional desire. Labeling our food choices as motivated by one or the other is neither practical nor realistic.  This type of thinking about food and eating is an inaccurate, oversimplification of a complicated biological process.

“There are about seven people in the world who righteously use food as fuel.
Six of them are professional marathon runners from Kenya... ”

Our physical and emotional hungers work together …including our need and desire for food.  We receive information from all of our feelings of hunger.  Our bodies are designed to make Eating Food emotionally satisfying, as well as physically satisfying.

Eating IS emotional. Food, like sex, has an impact on the way we feel. The effects may be temporary, but they still exist, and we are allowed to utilize food as a coping mechanism if we so choose.

Everything we do in life involves CHOICE. Even refusing to choose is a choice. All of our Behaviors are based on the personal, individual choices we make as we follow our own true life VALUES.  Each of us has the mental power and the physical ability to make and follow through with personal and individual choices about our own Behaviors, despite feelings of physical or emotional hunger, ….including what, when, and how much food we will eat at any particular time.

Some might be thinking…
........“But where do I draw the line? If I let myself eat emotionally I’d NEVER STOP.”
And the answer is
........“Each one of us individually gets to draw the line.”
Where ever we want to draw it.

Every human behavior brings consequences, either positive, negative or both.  Although we have the ability to control our BEHAVIORS, we have NO ability to control our RESULTS, …the eventual outcomes of our Behaviors. 

Human bodies have many genetic differences, including height, skin color, eye color, facial features, muscle development,  placement of fat deposits.  No matter what eating and/or exercise choices we make, our bodies are limited by our genetics, and less than 2% of the population can ever become a slender, shapely model such as we see in advertisements.

Despite our individual differences, specific physical Behaviors will guarantee certain specific physical Results.  If we CONSISTENTLY eat LESS food than our individual body needs, that body will become thin, weak, tired, and hungry.  If we CONSISTENTLY eat MORE food than our individual body can use, we will store it as fat.  This is a Physical Fact of Life that Can’t be Changed.   People, however, do have the ability to choose their own Attitude as well as the positive or negative Values they place on being “Thin” or  “Fat”.

However we do it, …“eating”  …including “overeating” or “undereating”… is not a vile behavior that is supposed to lead to feelings of shame.  Each of us is free to eat however we choose at the time, for whatever reason.  

Bottom Line:   We are adults, and we can do whatever the F*** we want.

Note: Originally posted April 7, 2016 - Bumped up for new viewers

        
                          

Sometimes I simply shake my head in wonder at the falsity of diet and fitness marketing.

This picture is a prime example of it.

First, it clearly indicates that body size and body appearance are totally under one’s own control.

“If you are a fat person
then all you have to do is
eat less, move more,
buy this,
do this and don’t do that
and YOU will get “healthy”
and look like THIS.”

Most women as large as the woman at the back of the picture would love to believe that these claims are true, and some seem determined to to live in Denial, even though many of them KNOW in their minds that those claims are Lies.

Note, that the desired body is a firm, young body. Next, a body that has been really fat is never going to have an appearance like the body of the woman at the front of the picture. 

People also have different genetic body types that determine where fat deposits itself on their bodies. There’s no such thing as “spot reduction”, and we don't get to choose which fat goes and which fat stays.  The fact is that even after a successful large weight-loss there’s a lot of loose skin to deal with, and it is unlikely that any “reduced fat” person ... of any age ....will ever achieve that kind of voluptuous, tight-skinned body even with plastic surgery and 6 to 7 days a week of heavy-duty exercise.

Also, the statement isn’t based on ANY kind of evidence.  First the entire “lose weight to be healthy” idea is based upon an untested hypothesis.  So few people have achieved significant long term weight loss that there simply aren’t enough to commission a statistically significant study.

Those who put forth weight loss as a health intervention can’t produce a study where more than a tiny fraction of participants ever lost weight long-term, and even then, most of the few “successes” they point to, lost only a tiny amount of weight. Weight Watchers claims success even though their own study showed that WW participants who successfully lost weight maintained only about a 5 pound loss over the following 2 years.

People attempt to use Fat bodies as “evidence”.  Marketing, ...which includes the medical profession,...  tries to claim that our bodies are evidence of unhealthy behaviors, lack of willpower, lack of self-care and any other appearance-based stereotypes they enjoy believing and perpetuating  Then they claim that this evidence is compelling enough to make it okay to target fat people for shame, stigma, bullying and humiliation because it's “for our own good”.

I found this recent article by a fitness guy interesting and am scrapbooking part of it here on DietHobby.

The Fitness-Industrial-Complex Is Deceiving You.
     by Patrick Mustain, MPH, MA 

Chances are, at some point in the last few days, you have been lied to about health. It’s a safe bet that some magazine or TV show has told you (yes, you!) that you can lose weight easily and quickly. This blatant lie is constantly being debunked by health and obesity experts, yet it persists, and people seem to continue to believe it.

More insidious, perhaps, is a not-so-obvious deception that permeates the language from the fitness industry--that dieting and exercise are things that you should be doing in the first place, and that failure to do either stems from a lack of personal responsibility, or some moral deficit.

Let’s put this notion to rest. Dieting and exercise are crazy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with people who fail to do either, and the sooner we can all acknowledge this, the happier and healthier we’ll all be.

For most of the history of life, the most important thing, for most people, was obtaining and conserving energy from food. Feeling guilty about eating food, and burning energy just for the sake of burning energy would have made no sense to our ancestors.

Of course, 10,000 years ago, we didn’t have cars, escalators, and office jobs. We didn’t drink refined sugar with every meal, we didn’t eat dessert every day, we didn’t shape our children’s food preferences with billions of dollars in marketing, and we didn’t have an industrialized food system dominated by hyper-palatable, energy-dense, nutritionally devoid, highly-processed products.

Clearly things are quite different now than they were 10,000 years ago, and in lots of good ways--we don’t have to chase down and kill our food. Thankfully, most of us will not be chased down and become meals ourselves. And we have plumbing. But, along with these advances, we’ve inherited a growing burden of obesity and chronic disease, soon to overtake tobacco as the leading cause of preventable death worldwide.

Enter the fitness industry.

As obesity and its associated health problems have reached global pandemic levels, the fitness industry has flourished. According to franchisehelp.com, the number of fitness centers in the U.S. went from roughly 17,000 in 2000 to almost 30,000 by 2008, and this growth is showing no signs of slowing down. A cursory glance at fitness websites, reality shows, magazines, gym literature, et cetera will tell us that the fitness industry is here to save us from being fat.

But being fat is not something that we need to be saved from. What we need to be saved from is an environment unlike anything any living thing has experienced in 4 billion years of evolution. A report from the Lancet concluded:

“Obesity is the result of people responding normally
to the obesogenic environment they find themselves in.”

Let me repeat: responding normally.

It is no surprise that we hear very little from the fitness industry about fostering an environment that prevents weight gain. Weight gain is the fitness industry’s bread and butter, so of course the focus is going to be on the quick fixes, the anecdotes about extreme weight loss “successes,” and the false sense of ease and speed—very little that actually has a meaningful impact on health.

All these things keep people striving for that unattainable goal, and coming back for that next issue of Shape, the next insanity workout, and the next belly-fat-busting miracle supplement. But the brilliant thing about all these products is that when they don’t work, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough to make them work. You failed at the diet. You didn’t exercise quite enough.

 

 NOTE: Originally posted on August 28, 2014.  Bumped up for new viewers.

What did

one skeleton

say to

the other?

Congratulations!

You

reached

the

Finish

Line.

When it comes to the issue

of Weight Loss & Maintenance

of that Weight-Loss,

As Long as Llife Exists...

There

is

NO Finish Line.

Saying it Again....

There is NO

Finish Line.

Those who would like to understand more should read the article: Running DOWN the UP Escalator - Weight Loss & Maintenance. 
Also, review the articles contained here at DietHobby, under:  Blog Category:  Research - Science. 

Good food,
Bad food,
and
Subversive
Food Combining.

By Michelle
May 9, 2016 @  fatnutritionist.com 

The idea that there are universally “good” foods and “bad” foods is an old one, ancient even. There are traces of it in Leviticus, though the way the concept was used then is perhaps different from how we use it now.

Given what we know about clinical nutrition, that sometimes a startling mix of foods can be used to help people in certain disease states — more ice cream and gravy for someone undergoing cancer treatment, less protein and fewer vegetables for someone with kidney disease — and since dividing your risk among a wide variety of different foods can help hedge your health bets, the idea that there are universally good or bad foods doesn’t hold up well under scrutiny.

I take it more as evidence of black-or-white thinking — a hallmark of diet culture — which is almost always false.

The words themselves, good and bad, imply a moral dynamic to food that I just don’t think belongs there. Sure, food can be literally bad if it’s spoiled or contaminated with botulism. But even if you eat this kind of bad food and get sick from it, we don’t generally assume that you now have become a bad and contaminated person.

We just think you’re sick, send soup, and wait for you to get better.

Getting food poisoning doesn’t stain your character or reputation, even if you are literally contaminated by a bacteria that a food has transmitted to you. There’s an implicit understanding that the body is self-cleansing and will get the pollution, the infection, out of its system over time. And though you might be averse to eating a food that made you sick in the future, due to stomach-churning associations, you probably won’t assume it is a universally bad food eaten only by bad people.

We do, however, make this assumption about moral contamination, that (morally) bad foods
(which are coincidentally usually high-calorie, presumably “fattening” foods) are eaten
by bad, gluttonous, ignorant, irresponsible, and usually low-class (and coincidentally fat) people.

And we try to avoid those foods, we claim, out of concern for our health.
But, in practice, it appears to be much more about avoiding that moral stain.

Even if there are foods that, in isolation, don’t produce ideal health outcomes for most people, does the idea that these foods are uniquely bad while other foods are uniquely good actually help us to be well-fed?

I’ve asked dozens of people this question, “Does believing in ‘bad food’ help you to eat better?” It’s an honest question. After looking at the ceiling for a second, then looking down and letting out a bitter little laugh, they always tell me no.

No, thinking of the foods they want to avoid as morally bad does not help them to eat a more nourishing diet in the long run. It doesn’t even help them to avoid those foods, most of the time. For a lot of us, it only succeeds in producing guilt for eating a perfectly human mix of foods.

If a belief in good foods and bad foods helped people, on balance, to eat better, I could grudgingly get behind the idea, though being a fat hedonist, I would always advocate for pleasure. But it fails even in its stated objective, to say nothing of the side-effects that come with it.

I do believe there are foods that are generally more nutritious than others (in certain ways, keeping in mind that macronutrients and the calories that represent them are still technically nutrients, after all), and which usually leave a person generally feeling better, and generally in better health, than others. But there’s also something to be said for eating and including foods that are designed primarily for pleasure, not for the cessation of physical hunger or the promotion of long-term health.

Learning to break down the categories of “good” food and “bad” food is a little tricky, but it can be done.

One of my favorite techniques for doing this, aside from giving yourself explicit permission and acknowledging that all food is food, is to do what I called “subversive food combining.” This means, simply, putting together foods that you would usually classify as good and bad, and that you would usually keep apart (that “healthy” meal of fish, rice, and vegetables you eat when you’re being “good,” vs. the pint of ice cream you eat when you’re being “bad”) by including them in the same meal, or even on the same plate.

Maybe I’m a jerk, but it gives me a cheap thrill. Some combinations I’ve tried:

•     Potato chips and salad
•     Sauteed kale and pizza
  
•     Peanut m&ms and an apple
  
•     Boxed macaroni and cheese with pork tenderloin and greens
  
•     Carrots with bean and cheese burritos
  
•     Cookies and almond
  

Telling yourself that there are no good foods and bad foods is one thing. It is necessary, but not sufficient to produce an actual change in how you view food. Backing it up with action is crucial.

Try it. Break a few rules. Crush the false dichotomy.

So, if thinking of foods as either good or bad doesn’t actually help people to eat better, what does? In my experience, it’s eating observantly, but non-judgmentally, and taking note of your pleasure both during and after eating. Noticing how food both tastes during eating, and how it makes you feel, physically, after.

Over a series of hundreds of personal experiments, you can start to shape your eating in a way that makes the most sense to you, that leaves you both happy and feeling healthy, and that improves measurable indices of health, like cholesterol or blood sugar. But in order to conduct these experiments, .......

You have to give yourself permission to eat anything.

You have to acknowledge that food is neither universally good or bad, real or not-real, pure or polluted.

And you have to believe that it cannot, by association, make you good or bad either.