Have you ever felt difficulty coping with healthy eating during lockdowns?
You are not alone!
"Lockdown – stress – anxiety – work-from-home – poor work-life balance – grief – frustration – burnout – loss of job/opportunity – undesirable snacking – stress eating – loss of activity – weight gain – degrading mental and physical health"
Kiwis have experienced it all in the past two years.
Under such stressful work/life conditions, we've all looked to the "comforting" snacks for solace. However, every bit of snack that goes in our tummy, can either be a boon or bane. Instead of diverting your mind to unhealthy "comforting" food, have you thought about granting yourself the power to decide when and what to put into your mouth during the pandemic?
After all, you are the boss and saviour of your body and mind.
Emotional hunger is not real hunger. It feels like hunger, but it only soothes emotional needs. Driven by emotional hunger, you may eat to satisfy your feelings, but not your body.
So why do we use food to relieve stress?
Because what negative emotions bring is a sense of emptiness, an emotional emptiness. Food intake, on the other hand, has long been used as a means of filling our physical emptiness. Therefore, we use food and eating to fill this emptiness and create a false sense of satiety to temporarily achieve this false satisfaction. Even a mix of hunger signals from stress and hormonal changes can send us into a state of emotional hunger.
Emotional eating can have many negative effects on the body.
- The volume issue that comes with emotional eating. Emotional eating is closely related to excess energy intake. In Australia, 83% of overweight and obese people experience emotional eating. Emotional eating is a negative cycle that can only lead to a vicious cycle of obesity.
- The qualitative problems of emotional eating. Emotional eating can lead to more junk food intake. The purpose of emotional eating is not to let your body receive nutrients and food, but to satisfy your emotional emptiness. Emotional hunger is often oppressive and urgent and can drive a craving for more unhealthy foods, such as sweet, fatty foods, to provide instant calories. You would want to eat more of a certain food until your mood improves.
During a pandemic, a balanced and varied diet can ensure the health and function of immune cells. Every stage of the immune response depends on the presence of nutrients in various foods, especially after vaccination. Foods rich in protein, dietary fibre, multivitamins and trace elements all exist in healthy food. Conversely, unhealthy junk food can lower our immunity. This is why we must prevent emotional eating.
Let's discuss how to detect emotional hunger in the next blog post.