Emotional Eating Can Make You Grow Bulges By Sharon Bell At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Proper nutrition has been the subject of countless important researches and a trip to your favorite bookstore will tell you that books on dieting sell faster than hotcakes. Today, everybody is expected to know what to eat or not to eat in order to avoid becoming overweight or laden with cellulite. It makes you wonder why people still get fat these days.

But in all fairness to people who are overweight and burdened with fatty deposits, such conditions are hardly brought about by what they put into their mouths. In other words, your body weight can not be solely determined by the food that you eat. Those saddlebags on your sides and the orange-peel skin on your thighs and arms may be brought more by emotional eating rather than ice cream and milkshakes.

Emotional eating is basically another term for overeating, where you are inclined to take large quantities of food and shove them down your throat. While it is true that most emotional eaters grab junk foods, whatever food you take does not really matter. Even if you are eating carrots or blueberries or any other healthy food item, when you try to eat anything in amounts that are beyond normal, you are suffering from emotional eating.

At first glance, you may think that this condition is a matter of having very large appetite. But it goes more than that; a closer look will reveal that emotional eating is caused by stress. Here's why.

Stress Hormones

If you were around tens of thousands of years ago, when mammoths were still roaming around and everyone you knew sported unibrows, you would experience food scarcity on a regular basis. Well, man was not the most dominant creature on the planet back then; and so nature gifted you with stress hormones to cope up with food shortages.

It was OK back then, but now that people hardly experience food scarcity, certain stress hormones can be bad for your health and figure. Cortisol, for example, is a stress hormone that allows you to store up large amounts of food in your body without endangering your well-being. This hormone is advantageous when there is shortage of food.

But frankly, how many times will you cross a dessert in this lifetime? And if the contents of the garbage bins are any indicator, there is a minute chance that America will experience famine. The point to all this is that hormones like cortisol are a good self-preserving mechanism of the body which has little or no purpose in today's modern times. And all that cortisol can bring about nowadays is stress or emotional eating and excess weight in individuals.

Regain Control

Now that you know what can cause emotional eating, your next step is to identify situations or factors that trigger the production of stress hormones in your body. Are you more inclined to load up on food when you feel frustrated or rejected? Do you tend to eat more when you feel pressured during important happenings like a date or a double promotion at work?

Identifying the instances that make you eat like mad will allow you to avoid those instances or even force yourself to turn away from the food table. Keeping a journal of all these events is a good way to remind yourself about stress triggers and keep your mind off the munchies.

In time, you will have a deeper understanding of what happens inside your body during stressful moments. When you have regained control of your eating habits, you can adopt alternative outlets for your stress that will help you maintain good health and attain a shapely body.

Exercise and outdoor activities are good alternatives to eating when you are stressed.

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