Source: The World
The pleasure for food is, for many, synonymous with quality of life. However, in its most pernicious side, it serves to cover gaps, silence the body and support stress.
Psychologist Debra Zellner proposed to a group of women – without mental health difficulties – to solve a problem. The first group had a task within reach of their possibilities; the second, an unsolvable one, which caused a lot of tension. All had a table with fruit and junk food. The stressed group not only ate more, but opted more for the latter (which did not happen with the group without stress). Although this irresistible desire to eat or to look for a harmful food is not pathological, it can be the prelude to an eating disorder.
EATING WITHOUT SETTING
Elisa has a job she likes, two children and a traveling husband. During the day you have so many things to do that you eat something stuck to your computer screen. When he arrives home he is hardly hungry because, curiously, he has become accustomed to living almost undernourished. Instead of sitting down and enjoying his dinner, what he feels is an irresistible urge to gobble up everything he finds in the pantry with no other criteria than to have it at his fingertips «I can eat two yogurts, followed by a can of mussels and a Sausage sandwich, «he says. She does not binge, she does not vomit, she is not depressed, she does not have a feeling of emptiness, but she devours without tasting and swallowing in a disorderly way (disorder favors stress in turn).
His life is too full of worries and chores. The carelessness of the morning leads to lack of control in the afternoon. When I see her, I think of a soldier in battle who can not relax because the enemy lurks: eating means swallowing what he finds to recover energy before returning to war. Your adversary are long lists of tasks that never end. He does not have an eating disorder, yet, but he is overweight.
Stress is activated in the face of what the nervous system perceives as a threat or a challenge and prepares us to fight or flee. It is an answer to the serious threats like we had 10,000 years ago when we lived in nature. Before a lion, the stressful response that facilitates a chute of energy was a useful and ingenious mechanism. Now our stressors are not acute but chronic, linked to our life in society: the boss, the children or unemployment are our attacks of lion. This assumes that cortisol, stress hormone, and glucose are permanently activated and not promptly as programmed.
Also, ghrelin, which is produced in the stomach and stimulates the appetite, rises with stress. When eating quietly, the feeling of hunger has to be replaced by satiety, which decreases the presence of this hormone (which requires time to deactivate).
When there is stress the mind dissociates and anesthetizes the body, so we eat uncontrollably until the mechanism of satiety is set in motion. To make matters worse, this situation alters the attention capacity and this stresses twice. We are children of a maladjusted system!
EMOTIONAL FOOD
Other functions of eating go beyond the biological and have to do with the reward systems of the brain. We also eat to fill gaps that we can not fill in any other way. Miriam has suffered a divorce that she did not want. For two years he struggled to stay afloat and move his son forward. He had a lot of work and fatigue, but he could stifle it with sports and happy times with his friends. He never ate because of stress, but now things are different.
With her divorce sentence she has begun to feel a great melancholy, not for her husband, but for the life she had imagined for herself and that now is not possible. When hungry, eat healthily; when he feels sorry he takes sweets, ice cream and chocolate to cushion his bitterness. Love only finds it in the stomach, although, after eating two chocolate palms, it does not support the feeling of guilt.
The food is born as a relational moment, but Miriam eats alone in front of the television. Many people get fat in this way – obesity for pain we call it – where sweet is their consolation. Sugar calms pain because it «activates the opiate system that transmits positive emotions,» says psychologist Elliot Blass of the University of Massachusetts. The sweets have the same effect, like chocolate: it affects us when we are depressed, but it does not change us if we feel neutral or positive. For people like Miriam, these foods are like a drug; they can not stop consuming it and each time they need more doses to achieve the same effect.
WHAT TO DO?
Eating without being satiated or foods that harm is a form of self-aggression through something that is good-food-just when we need to take care of ourselves the most