I love Bridget Jones. I read all the books and when I heard that Réene Zellweger and Colin Firth were going to co-star the films I couldn’t hide my excitement. They are both perfectly cast. The books and films tell the story of Bridget Jones, a single woman in her thirties. The story tells the tale of her misadventures with men and her frustrations with self image and self-steem. The films portray how society accepts the fact that when we are disappointed or sad, binge drinking and binge eating on fast processed food is something we all identify ourselves with.
Actually, one of the first scenes of the movie shows Réene Zeweger in her living room singing “All by my self” while drinking wine in her pyjamas. In another scene, after she has broken up with Hugh Grant, she is seen again in her pyjamas with a tub of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and an empty pack of doritos checking her phone messages.
I find it staggering how something that should be seen as pathological or at least not very logical, such as poisoning yourself with alcohol and unhealthy food that affects your brain and internal organs when you are most vulnerable, is seen as the most understandable and rational thing to do in that situation. If our ancestors had done that when injured, or tired, or unwell, there would not be any humans left.
But why and when did we start using toxic substances such as alcohol and sugar to pick us up, to make us feel better about ourselves, to numb our emotions….?
Originally, emotional eating was defined as the compulsion to eat to soothe negative emotions, recent studies have concluded that positive emotions also trigger the need to eat in some people. Although, most of us lose our apetite when upset, stressed, frustrated or angry, there are people that suffer with strong food cravings when they are at their lowest. The need to eat (certain foods- because most emotional eating behaviours involve high sugar/fat containing foods) arises when they are feeling strong emotions, most of them negative but sometimes positive too.
And why does this happen? Our brains are amazing machines that regulate our whole bodies with millions of pathways connecting them with our different organs. The brain sends information to the rest of the body by secreting small molecules of chemicals called neurotransmitters that have the information needed for the organ to function when the body needs it. But why does my stomach tell me that I am hungry when I am sad or lonely or upset? Am I really hungry? The answer is no, you are not hungry, your body doesn’t need the nutrients, you actually don’t need food. What your brain is seeking is the feeling your body gets after you eat, so your sadness, loneliness, frustration…goes away. In this case, your brain “tricks you” to think you are hungry when you are not. Brains are powerful things….
Why does this happen? The answer is in the brain reward system, an intricated system of neurological connections that helps us stay alive. We are born with this system. When the body eats or drinks or does something that improves our chances of survival, the system secretes a series of neurotransmitters that work by stimulating the areas of our brains that gives us pleasure, so we remember this and do it again. For example, when we have sex we feel pleasure so we do it again and again to procreate and ensure the survival of the species, the same happens when we exercise to keeps us healthy or when we eat food with sugar or high content of calories. The problem is when this system is over stimulated during our first few years of life or later on, we end up “learning behaviours” that constantly give us pleasure. For example, if we celebrate our birthdays or successes with food and drink, we will crave food and drink when we are happy or when something good happens in our personal or professional life. The same will happen if we use high sugary foods when we are sad or lonely or when we feel a strong negative emotion. These behaviours, sometimes learnt in our childhood, will perpetuate the emotional hunger that we feel in certain situations when we are adults.
Some studies show that those people who suffered neglect or any type of abuse in childhood are more at risk of developing emotional eating behaviours than those that had the support of a family growing up and were able to develop different strategies to cope with their emotions. The problem is, society in general has normalised these behaviours over the years so more and more people think it is normal to want a piece of cake or a glass of wine when you come back home in the evening after a hard day at work.
Treatment for emotional eating disorders is long and complex, one of the best strategies we can start implementing is teaching our younger generation that we should not use food or drink to cope with our negative or positive emotions, it doesn’t matter how strong they are. Learning to talk about them, to share with people that love you and support you, using other ways to stimulate our pleasure centre like exercise, music, meditation are healthier ways of coping with strong feelings. If we learn when we are young we will take these lessons with us when we are adults and we will be able to live happy and long lives.
