Emotional eating
Archived from August 06, 2006
The other day a friend of mine told me that he is an emotional eater. I've heard other people say this same thing. That when they are sad or stressed out, they eat. I am the opposite. I don't eat at times of emotional stress, but I do eat when I am bored or tired.
There are a great many people in this world who are "emotional eaters". It leads me to wonder if there is an evolutionary benefit to it. Like perhaps back in the cave day, when people experienced emotional stresses along the lines of seeing one's children being eaten by a tiger, perhaps the hunger switch would go on because one legitimately thought his/her life was in danger, or that s/he would be driven from the cave and away from food stockpiles. Although it's my understanding that cave personnel did not keep food around, but ate it as s/he found it and a clan finished off a kill in one night. But let's pretend they have stores of food in their cave and all of a sudden a cave lion comes bursting in and eats all the food and children. Maybe the remaining person would need to quickly run out and down some berries or something because s/he didn't know where they were sleeping that night and might have a rocky road ahead.
Then I think of my own behavior, and how when I feel depressed I don't eat. This is also a common behavior. It might be some kind of self sacrificing behavior, connected to being the runt or some kind of martyr shit. But really, I don't feel hungry, so maybe when someone experienced emotional cave stress it would be sensible for their bodies to go on high alert, and NOT eat because a) all the food and children were eaten, so there was none left b) now that the children were gone there was more food to go around. It is also feasible, that since I'm a woman, it has something to do with fertility. Perhaps it is best to feast in times of low stress so you're more fertile, whereas sometimes high stress scenarios can lead to miscarriages or pregnancy complications. But I don't know how prevalent miscarriages were in caventimes.
Anyway you slice it; emotional eating or not eating is a contemporary problem. It's most likely due to basic associations with the act of eating i.e. happy memories are those when people were eating, so food, bring me happiness now. Or the opposite, eating has bad connotations, so when I'm feeling bad the last thing I want to do is chow down and feel worse.
In the words of Styx: AMERICA! AMERICA! AMERICA! AMERICA! AMERICA! AMERICA! AMERICA! AMERICA!
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