What Exactly is COMFORT EATING?

SPEAKER_00: Hi, this is Shelly Treacher from Underground Confidence. Today I'm gonna start a bite podcast series. These are quick tips specifically for comfort eating recovery, and today I start at the beginning by answering what comfort eating is. So stay tuned for some great questions that will help you explore and understand your eating a little bit better. The first thing to say is that comfort eating is where we get some kind of comfort from our food. This could be physical, mental, emotional, or even spiritual. We know that with research that food is comforting, particularly junk food. It can give us a chemical response in our brains and in our bodies that can help us to feel calm, soothed, or even excited. This is called comfort eating when there's some kind of comfort or psychological element attached to it. When people come to me about overeating, they're often not very sure whether they are a comfort eater or not. They often think that they're in a habit that they can't get out of for some reason. And of course that is entirely true. There is a lot of habitual patterning around comfort eating. And a lot of things that happen in the brain, a lot of chemical responses that produce and contribute to that habit. But there is also a stress or an emotional or a psychological element behind the comfort eating, hence the term comfort eating. Although this can also be known as food addiction, binge eating, binge eating disorder, food obsession, food compulsion, junk food addiction, sugar addiction or any other kind of food or specific product or substance addiction. And so many of us are on the spectrum of gaining comfort more or less from food. In fact, I don't know anybody who doesn't get comfort from food. Do you? As I said, it's often something uncomfortable that we're responding to inside ourselves that leads us to eat comfort food or any other kind of comforting substance. There are so many possible emotional, psychological, mental, physical reasons for turning to comfort food, and I've talked a lot about some of the emotional ones here in this podcast, from loneliness, feeling abandoned to relationship difficulties, to feeling criticized and underconfident, to feeling bored, home alone, to having some kind of physical pain or even being triggered by hormones that cause up and down of emotions. But it all leads from and stems back to feeling some kind of inner discomfort. Even if it's just the discomfort of not repeating the same habit that you're used to repeating every day. By not doing something unusual, here you're habitually anaesthetizing yourself so that you feel more comfortable. So the aim of this first quick tip is to encourage you to start to think about what emotional, physical, energetic discomfort there might be behind your eating? What would happen if you didn't reach for that habitual snack after dinner, or the one that you have at lunchtime, where you overeat just a little bit, or the sugary thing that you have for breakfast? What would happen if you didn't have the thing that you're used to having? What physical sensations would you be left with? What emotions and feelings, and what kinds of thoughts would you be having? And just write these down for now. Start a diary of what's happening just before you start eating that thing. This is gonna start to give you some idea of what the discomfort is behind your comfort eating and why you comfort eat, and later in more quick tips, we'll start to deal with how you can work with that. So that's today's quick tip and bite podcast. If you need further help than this with your comfort eating and recovery from that, please check out what I have to offer on undergroundconfidence.com. There will be other random quick bite tips coming your way in the next few weeks. This is Underground Confidence with Shelly Treacher. I'll see you soon.