Confined to his home with an injured knee, Bob finds himself consuming pizzas that he orders in "by the carload". He can't seem to get enough of biting into them. He doesn't suspect the real culprit –– a desperate anger at being helpless and at home. I will tell you more about his dilemma in a minute, but you may be wondering how can this be? Can there be a connection between compulsive eating and anger?
The answer is a resounding YES. No one enjoys feeling angry; and food can be a convenient way to "swallow" your anger right away – or at least that's the way it seems. In fact, food can be so soothing that it allows you to avoid any negative emotions you may be feeling when the cravings strike. If you reach for the food fast enough you probably don't even notice you're feeling anything unpleasant at all.
This is especially true for the emotion of anger. Our society conditions us to keep our angry feelings under control, but sometimes this includes not feeling the anger at all. If you're like most people, you're not comfortable with anger; and food is an easy way to keep it at bay and avoid expressing it.
Of course, the problem is that your anger doesn't go anywhere when you eat unwisely as a way of handling it. You still feel the anger; it's just hidden from your awareness for a while by the temporary comfort of food. Meanwhile, the downside is that you gain pounds and the feelings remain dormant, ready to come up to the surface and bring about yet another food craving. It's a no-win continuous cycle.
Back to Bob's situation. An active athlete his entire life, he is temporarily incapacitated with a bad knee injury and post-surgery he has no choice but to sit idle for a few months until his knee recuperates.
Bob's emotional equilibrium has been completely thrown off by this experience. He has no idea how to sit still without going crazy. Since cooking is difficult with his injured knee, he orders a whole pizza for delivery most days. He eats every bit of the pizza fiercely, biting into it and ripping the crust with his teeth. This works for him in a way because it helps him to forget his resentment and fasten his awareness only on the pizza and the biting.
But this is the problem – Bob is paying a big price for handling his anger in this way. He has put on 12 pounds in just a few weeks, and if he continues like this during the entire period of his recuperation, he'll put on a lot more pounds. Bob has obviously fallen victim to the habit of emotional overeating.
You can see the logic. Using food to suppress anger is the equivalent of "swallowing" your feelings rather than expressing them. And the biting action offers some relief because it satisfies the primal instinct to bite our enemies in defense. For this reason, crunchy foods may feel especially good at such times.
There are several techniques for conquering emotional overeating, but here is something you can do immediately to break the habit of using food as an anger suppressor:
Take a 3" x 5" index card and write the following sentence on it:
"Even though I'm angry at (insert name of person or situation) and can't express this openly, I choose to honor my anger and deeply and completely accept myself (or "love myself," etc.) without judgment."
Before you go to bed each night, and after you rise in the morning (and at any other time you wish), read this sentence out loud to yourself three times.
This is a mini-version of the powerful "EFT Choices Method" which is a highly effective technique for combating emotional overeating. EFT utilizes the principles of acupressure and uses light tapping on certain strategic comfort spots on your face and upper body to train your mind to become more peaceful and self-accepting – a great advantage for losing pounds. You will no longer feel that compulsion to grab for unnecessary food when you come into harmony with yourself and accept your anger.
Self-help techniques like EFT are especially important because they get to the core of the eating problem, while diets usually fail because they focus on what foods you are eating rather than the reason you're eating them.
If you find yourself consistently overeating and don't know why, you're probably using food to suppress certain feelings. The next time you are tempted to eat unwisely, think about whether you have reason to feel angry, and begin to pay attention to your angry feelings. If anger is the culprit (it might be some other emotion) try the EFT exercise given above, and watch the pounds melt away!
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