Food Fight Part 6: Eating Your Feelings ≠ Resolving Your Feelings

Myth #10 What I eat doesn’t matter

Myth #11 My body will adjust

The Germans have a word ‘kummerspeck’. It literally translates to ‘grief bacon’ and refers to the phenomenon of eating when you’re sad, and the weight that you gain as a result.

If the Germans have a whole word for it, it is probably a legitimate phenomenon. 

It’s only really in the last year that I have started to differentiate between physical hunger and emotional hunger. 

I think part of it is growing up in a culture where you were encouraged to be happy all the time, and be willing to happily work all the time, and keep going ad infinitum. It necessitates this trade off with yourself of ‘yes, I can keep going, but first I need a [insert thing here].’ 

Eckhart Tolle in his book New Earth, says your ego has a default setting of always needing more. You then have to consciously realise that that is not always true, and work to turn that off. Our default setting is greed, insatiability; MORE. It shows as desire. People fill it with food, alcohol, sex, gambling, sensation seeking, work, exercise, drugs, and other ‘addictions’. 

“A lot of eating and overeating has a lot to do with the ego, because the ego lives in a constant state of not enough. It always seeks something else to fill itself with, usually its experiences, to self-identify this or that, or things, but it’s also ‘the need for more’ as I call it, that is built into the ego, sometimes can get transferred to the body, and then you experience it as the desire to eat much more than the body really wants.“

For me, boredom manifests as hunger.

Sadness manifests as hunger.

Stress manifests as hunger.

A very basic but profound realisation.

Could it be that when we’re allowed to actually feel our feelings, we can acknowledge the feelings, let them pass, and not have to take a detour through vices and addictions?

We are peppered with sayings like ‘Only boring people get bored‘ as if the day to day inanities of life should fill one with ecstacy, or ‘Choose to be happy‘ implying that if we’re sad, we’ve also chosen to be. Stress is glorified, and anyone with a job worth having complains of being busy and stressed. It has become an insidious part of normal, one we can hardly imagine ourselves without.

People are encouraged to not be led solely by their feelings. That some feelings are ‘bad’, ‘counterproductive’ or ‘wrong’. When we internalise this message, that can divorce us from our feelings so we stop feeling them in the first place, and mean that we do what needs to get done, regardless of how we feel.

To a certain extent, there’s an element of necessity to this. Being an adult is doing things you don’t want to do a bunch of the time, with a smile plastered on your face. The definition of ‘professional’ can usually be translated to ‘overcome your base humanity and stop feeling your feelings’.

When we numb, when we shun or avoid our feelings, resulting in us being mechanical, disengaged, or purely pragmatic. When it is taken to extremes, we get sociopaths, psychopaths and a resounding lack of empathy for others and ourselves.

Numbing feelings with vices, escapism, food, or other means can be a really helpful coping strategy. This is fine in the short term. But it’s not without it’s consequences.

Somehow it’s more acceptable to say that I’m hungry, rather than I’m bored, sad or stressed.

Turns out when you eat to relieve emotional pain, your brain gets a hit of dopamine, (the chemical responsible for helping you achieve goals, but also responsible for addiction – we’ll be coming back to this in more detail later) serotonin, (the happiness hormone) and several other physiological factors. (Read more about this phenomenon here, here and here.)

I just thought I was hungry.

So, I ate.

I used to think that grief was just crying all the time. It is so much more than that. There was a visceral, gnawing emptiness, a fatigue that no sleep could cure, an almost physical ache so deep I could hardly breathe, a rage that burned with the fire of a thousand suns, and a hunger that could absolutely not be satiated.

I went from walking 8km a day and swimming 1km 5 days a week, runs, martial arts, soccer, and not really needing to eat, to barely being able to get out of bed and eating everything in sight. 

There is a physical side to grief.

It is deeply inconvenient. 

The magnitude of food at Peter’s wake was enormous. Our church community catered, and the tables were laden. The leftovers got left in our freezer, and that slab cheesecake?

Yea, don’t worry, I was alllll over that. 

Steven and I just raided the freezer for about 3 months after the funeral. I could hardly stay awake at my desk at work, reduced my hours down to part time. Exercise went down to zero. Overnight, my overflow of energy eviscerated, and I ate to bridge the gap.

This has been substantiated by brain scans – “a 2016 study in the journal Neuroimage found that people who had persistent, intrusive grief experienced disrupted activity in the prefrontal cortex—as seen on functional MRI (fMRI) scans—during tasks that involved emotion processing.” (Source) The prefrontal cortex is where you make a lot of decisions, forward plan, and emotionally regulate.

Grief changes you. More specifically, grief changes your brain.

There were so many things in those months afterwards I couldn’t fix, but hunger? That one was easy. 

The anti-depressants my doctor prescribed me 6 months after my brother’s passing only compounded the fatigue. I ate energy rich foods to stay awake. I used yet more sugar to keep myself awake as I was just about falling asleep at my desk.  

Food was no longer about physical hunger, but emotional emptiness. 

There was a gaping Peter-sized void in my life, and I filled it with food, with sex, with alcohol, with trying to live two people’s worth of lives.

It was momentarily satiated, but much like the plant in The Little Shop of Horrors, the more I fed this emptiness, the more it grew. 

The more I ate, the more my hunger grew. The more I grew, too.

My nutritionist friend told me that once people get to a certain level of fatness, the fat cells impact appetite and increase it even more, creating a positive feedback cycle that’s near impossible to change. 

A little fatalistic perhaps. 

But I was still hungry.

So I ate.

I was still sad.

So I ate.

It sounds so simple when I spell it out now, that that was what was going on. But at the time, it was just nagging, relentless physical hunger. 

I ate and it went away for a while.

So I kept eating. 

There was nothing left to be slim for. Why bother trying? 

Life was short, and shitty; eat dessert first.

Knowledge is power, and knowing yourself is the ultimate power.

There is a way to overcome this.

Eckhart Tolle explains to the audience of the New Earth podcast the antidote to the ego controlling your appetite is this:

“I would suggest when you eat french fries, to make a meditation out of it. Eat them consciously, without having a secondary entity in your head saying that you shouldn’t be eating these. Eat them fully and consciously. At the same time, listen to how your body feels, when you eat them, after you’ve eaten them. Then you bring some presence into it, and you may realise, in some cases, that the body doesn’t actually want to eat them, it was the mind that wanted to eat French fries. Eat consciously.” Savour it. Go slowly. Enjoy every bite. Use all of your senses. Put it down in between each bite. Close your eyes and truly taste every morsel. Listen to your body. When you’re done with the pleasure of it, let it go.

Much the same can be done with feelings.

Observe yourself feeling your feelings, and ponder about them. Let them manifest if they want to, if you want them to. When they’ve served their purpose, done their time, let them pass.

Live consciously. Savour life. Go slowly. Enjoy every bit.

What was the last thing you ate as a mediatation? Do you find comfort eating is a tool in your coping kete? What other strategies do you find useful? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks for reading!