What is the connection between food and emotion?
For a compulsive overeater, anorexic or bulimic, eating is attached to emotions. We are never fully satisfied, no matter how much we eat or avoid eating, because we are eating for emotional reasons rather than physical reasons. We eat for excitement, love, celebration, loneliness, escape, pleasure, and comfort. We devour food, purge, or abort eating to anesthetize ourselves. We eat out of anger, resentment, envy, jealousy, fear, pride, guilt, and grief. As the problem worsens, and it always does because this is a progressive disease, the self-destructive impact of overeating begins to far outweigh the temporary pleasure or comfort that eating once brought. For the Anorexic, starvation becomes a way of obtaining that “emotional high” The Bulimic feels that “rush and relief” of the purge cycle. Eventually, some of us do this for so long that we become addicted to an eating pattern for no apparent reason, even when the pleasure has turn to pain.
