Do you feel guilty when you eat? Or do you think about how many calories that food on your plate has? Or do you visualize what you are eating at that moment in the form of a love handle?
Feelings of guilt are one of the key psychological elements to understand eating problems, and even if it does not go hand in hand with disorders such as anorexia or bulimia, it is necessary to know how to manage them. Let’s sink our teeth into everything that has to do with our overweight and overeating…
It may be interesting, when looking at our relationship with food, to think that Our body is the product of the evolution of living beings for millions of years., and that throughout most of this evolution food was not as available as it is now. Think, if you think it can help you, how prehistoric man/woman would live and how harsh the external conditions would be in those contexts in which the first civilizations had not yet emerged…
Imagine that your ancestor from many generations ago has not eaten anything for several days, and suddenly a bush full of raspberries appears in front of him. What a binge! There is no time to lose, lest someone from the rival tribe comes, so… Until they are finished, there is not a single one left! The body will later take care of storing the excess nutrients in the form of fat, since there may not be any more raspberries for the rest of the week. We could call this way of eating “quickly, it’s over“.
Let’s go back to current times just as they do in the television series, jumping in time… Nowadays, we go to the supermarket and a multitude of foods are waiting for us, with their best packaging, waiting to be chosen, to go through. box and be eaten in our house… Although we live in the world of abundance, again the “quickly, it’s over” mode is activatedand without taking off our jacket we have already opened the chocolate bar.
A couple more facts that make things a little more difficult for us are, on the one hand, the human body’s preference for foods rich in sugars and fats (in past times they made us have more reserves, today they create massive health problems) and On the other hand, when the body has its reserves covered, it tends to move less.
From poor food management to guilt, and vice versa
Since we are not usually aware of all this that is in our biological heritage as a species, sometimes, As we gain weight, self-criticism, shame, even humiliating treatment of oneself begins.…And what does this usually create? Well, that state of discomfort that we generally want to correct… you guessed it, by eating more fatty, sweet or very salty products.
One of the most promising approaches to breaking this cycle of “quick, it’s over” eating to self-criticism is Compassion Focused Therapy, specifically the CFT-E (Compassion Focused Therapy for Eating Disorders) by Ken Goss, in which in addition to developing a whole work of dealing with difficulties related to eating, a model structured in six steps is proposed to improve relationship with food. If you would like to implement this approach, at Psikonet we are developing it with several patients, call us!
