Behavior: Emotional Eating & Eating Disorders

Women are not necessarily more vulnerable to emotional eating than men, however, women talk about it more, and, as a rule, are more weight conscious than men are.

Women are also more in touch with their feelings, as a rule, so that when they feel bad — they know it! Men may have emotions, but they don’t necessarily pay attention to them. A woman may feel badly, know she feels badly, and know that she wants to feel better. Instead of confronting the feelings that are making her hurt, and figuring out why she feels badly, she may try to numb the feelings or distract herself from the feelings by using a substance. The substance can be food, alcohol, drugs, work, exercise or something more damaging like cutting.

To avoid emotional eating, follow the following steps:

1. Try to identify your feelings. This is a discipline for many people.

2. When you identify a feeling, figure out what made you feel that way.

3. See if you can eliminate the things that made you feel bad — or rather than eliminate them, face them and solve the problem that is causing the bad feelings.

4. Recognize this pattern when it occurs again.

5. Keep at it. This is not an overnight fix.

Eating disorders are increasingly diagnosed, and the business of treating them has mushroomed. Technology is part of everyone’s lives today, and online communication about eating disorders — is also widely available and growing each day.

The problem with online eating disorder communication on the internet is that it can be unsupervised and less controlled than an in patient program or even a one on one person to person, face to face program. Eating disorders are often triggered by different images, emotions, behaviors, or discussions. These triggers on the internet are all over the place for people suffering from eating disorders. In fact, there are even pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia websites!

Technology is wonderful, but if a person has an eating disorder, it’s care needs to be taken seriously, and a controlled environment or medical program to help heal the victim of the disorder, is what’s best.