Resources For You : Emotions
Our experience suggests that 3 of every 4 overweight clients associate food with emotions to some extent. Often these are deep-rooted associations that go back to their infancy, when mothers would respond to baby’s discomfort with a bottle or a soother dipped in sugar. Such deep-rooted associations are not easy to discard. Faced with acute emotional stress, such clients literally cannot stop themselves from eating, the best of intentions and willpower notwithstanding. The best way to control such a habitual response is to work on the emotion itself, to try to make it less intense. The milder the emotional stress the easier it is to control the response.
Food reward: People often associate food with joy, happiness and the good life. This tendency to associate food with unrelated rewards is strongly reinforced in our consumer society. Food related advertising can be summarised as follows: If you want to be as beautiful, successful and happy as the people in the commercial, simply eat this food or drink this drink, with such messages incessantly hammered at us from our TV screens and in the pages of magazines, many people begin to believe them. Our observations suggest that about 85% of overweight people reward themselves with food. Reality of course is the opposite. The excess weight that results from the over consumption of food is a far greater punishment than any reward there might be in it's consumption.