I'd Kill for a Cookie: the Food/Mood Connection

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Hi everyone! I’m happy you’re starting 2009 with me. It’s going to be a good year. I hope you made time to listen to last week’s podcast on ‘how big is your but’ where I asked you what is the ‘but’ that keeps you stuck in your rut and prevents you from moving ahead to reach your goals for your health. Did you have a mental boot camp with yourself, an up close and personal inventory to get at why you are blocked by the ‘but’? Oprah has. If you watched her first shows of the year, you heard her discuss her weight gain openly and honestly. She was very authentic and talked about her thyroid issues and how life took over and got out of balance. She remarked how her closet is full of various clothing sizes. Do you have a closet just like that with all sizes of clothes?

Has life in the New Year already become overwhelming for you? Did you begin with resolutions only to give up already because life has gotten in the way? It has for many people. This past week I’ve kept my ear to the media listening to all the stories about weigh and health. In addition to Oprah, singer Wynonna is the new spokesperson for the drug Alli. Marie Osmond promotes Nutrisystem. There are weight loss challenges on almost every TV station and people are focused on nutrition, weight and health. One of the comments Oprah made was that when you work too much and play too little, food begins to cover what you’re really hungry for…..balance in your life. Food becomes your drug of choice, your best friend, and your comforter. It’s legal, ubiquitous and most of the time no one looks down on you for eating.

I want you to ask yourself? Do you eat not because you are hungry but because you are sad, lonely, or angry? Are you eating because you’ve lost your job and concerned about paying bills? Are you eating because you are you going thru a divorce or maybe recently diagnosed with a tough medical issue? When Dr. Christie and I wrote I’d Kill for a Cookie, we surveyed 1000 people and guess what? Two out of three reported that they stress eat or emotionally eat for many of these same reasons. The reality for all of us is that life throws us curve balls that we never expected. Tough emotional issues are part of our lives. The food-mood connection is real and it’s strong. But food only meets your emotional needs for a quick fix. It’s not a replacement for love and can’t fill you with long term joy.  Is emotional eating preventing you from getting healthy both physically and emotionally? I want you to really think about your relationship to food. 

If you know that food calls your name when you’re emotionally upset and you turn to food for comfort, it’s time to put on the brakes and start strategies to stop emotional eating. I want you to take three steps over the next three to four weeks. 

4. Recognize emotional eating for what it is. Pay attention to your emotions all this coming week and notice every time you eat if you’re truly hungry or if you’re reacting to something and eating because of the emotions.
5. Decide what actions you can take to help you deal with the emotions besides turning to food. Seek professional counseling if you feel it’s needed or confide in friends or family members and come up with some strategies to begin to deal with the situation instead of the situation driving you to emotionally eat.
6. Start one new healthy eating strategy. Here are two to choose from:
1. If you don’t eat breakfast, start. Research shows that people who eat breakfast eat less during the day so it’s easier to control your food intake when your emotions feel out of control.
2. Eat more frequently. If you are an emotional eater and go more than four hours without food, you already know that it’s easy to eat and eat a lot. When you eat more frequently, you have less low blood sugar moments and feel less compelled to eat in response to your emotions. If it’s hard to find time to eat, make sure you have healthy snacks at work, in your gym bag, briefcase or home office. Otherwise it’s too easy to reach for junk….it’s always available somewhere right? What should a health snack be? A lean protein and high fiber carbohydrate combination.

Let me know how you are doing. My goal all this year is to empower you each week with credible nutrition information that works in your life…that meets you where you are right now. So this week, do something just for you and take a look at the role of food in your life. Let food empower you and your health not take away from it. You were meant to be healthy and fit.