Obesity has become an increasingly common problem in westernised society, and something which has affected not only adults but also young children. The reason for this appears to be quite simple, people are eating more food than they used to do in the past and they are exercising less.
However things aren't quite as simple as this, because the way a person is feeling can affect the amount of food they eat. For example, if you have ever felt sad, depressed or unhappy there is a good chance that you turned to food in order to make you feel better. Or if you were bored, then perhaps you decided to snack on something to relieve that boredom?
This form of eating is known as emotional eating, and is a term which describes the use of food in order to change an emotional state. This is also one of the major causes of obesity, because not only is food more readily available than it once was, but people are becoming more and more unhappy with themselves and their life. Put both of these factors together, and you get a dangerous combination that leads to emotional eating.
What makes emotional eating even more of a problem, and why it can so easily lead to obesity, is the fact that this form of eating occurs not when a person is physically hungry but when they are feeling a particular negative emotional state. The effect of this is that food is eaten when the body doesn't require food, and so whatever is eaten ultimately becomes stored as fat because the body simply cannot or does not need to use it.
Compounding this matter further is the fact that food becomes seen as a comfort, and therefore something which a person turns to whenever they are feeling down. For example, suppose you had a bad day, so to make you feel better you eat some chocolate. Then next week you have another bad day, and so you turn to chocolate again.
Given enough time you will develop the habit of eating chocolate whenever you are feeling down, and so chocolate becomes seen as your "comfort food". This is exactly how emotional eating starts, and before long you will be eating chocolate all the time just to make you feel good.
However the problem with this is that because you are eating when you are not hungry, and eating low quality food, you will begin to gain more and more weight, until you eventually become obese. This then creates a new problem, as now your physical appearance makes you feel even worse. So what do you do, eat some more chocolate to make you feel better again! And so the cycle continues.
There is no doubt emotional eating is a big problem in westernised society, but it is something which you can deal with simply by listening to your feelings and then responding appropriately to them.
Autor: Mark David Peters
To find out more about emotional eating, please see my website: Cause Of Emotional Eating & Primary & Secondary Feelings
Added: July 20, 2009
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/
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