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Eating Disorders

Dealing with emotional eating

Stop it! Stop it right now! Well if it was that easy you wouldn't even think of doing it correct? Or will you wait until you are throwing up? How about throwing up and eating again? Have you been there and done that?

Is getting fat enough to scare you? Is getting very fat enough to scare you? Probably not, otherwise would statistics show that more than 60 percent of our population is seriously overweight? Emotional eating is a common problem. A relatively minor annoyance if you are less than twenty pounds overweight. A life stealing, devastating behavior if you are super-obese.

Got the blues? Feeling let down? Take it from a guy who was once in claiming distance of weighing a quarter of a ton, emotional eating is not worth the cost. So you haven't got the dream girl. You got fired for being too slow on the job and the steering wheel of your car hurts your belly and that makes left hand turns difficult. How is eating going to relieve anything but a chemical imbalance in your brain? Will eating large amounts of food while holding back tears make you more popular or more capable in the eyes of others?

Those tears and the feelings that go with them should be a clue to you as to what is going on. Eating while feeling low is your adaptation to the stress. And it is a vicious conundrum of your genetic body chemistry as well as what your body has learned from repeated trial and error, probably from your earliest childhood.
That's right, those pangs calling you to eat mass quantities are both a trained response to emotions and the biological responses your body and especially the brain have become used to from repeated feeding when under stress. What if you had run around the block or gotten in front of a batting machine as a child instead of scarfing a large pizza with everything and a 2 liter bottle of cola?

But the real question is when will you wake up to yourself? I hope it happens for you long before you anger a friend by breaking a chair, or hurt yourself by sitting in one of those tight seats at the movie multiplex that are so tight you have to sit sort of sideways and still ignore the pain in your flesh from the arms digging in.

You can consult a bariatrician, join a health club and find a professional counselor knowledgable about obesity. Best of all do all three. In doing so you may learn to eat smarter and feel good, physically and mentally.

A bariatrician is a doctor specializing in the treatment of obesity. This physician can help in


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Dealing with emotional eating

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Dealing with emotional eating

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