Article written by Daniel Max, Holistic Health Counselor, Yoga Instructor, Shiatsu Practitioner, owner of Sense of Self

“I’m glad you’re overeating,” I told my friend, who was complaining she has no willpower around food and consequently is overweight.

“How do you feel right after you eat?” I asked.
“Guilty,” she answered.
“And before that?”
“Calm.”
Exactly!

Overeating, or any other symptom or unwanted behavior always has a beautiful reason for its presence. In my friend’s case, her overeating calms her, fills her, and medicates her. While it may have negative consequences in the immediacy, it is relaxing. When we are overly stressed we have to do something overly relaxing. We each have tools to bring us down.

Our nervous system is structured in a way that we can respond to each moment in a way that contributes towards either stress or relaxation. Its either/or.

If we are concerned with weight issues, impaired digestion or matters of immunity, we often examine the body and forget to take into account the effect of life itself on health, weight and metabolism.

When we are affected by stress, we contract both physically and emotionally. When our emotional energy is stuck, metabolism is stuck. We can continue to try to battle the symptom, but unless we learn ways to increase the relaxation response and care for ourselves within times of stress (career, relationship, finances,) symptoms such as overeating will most likely prevail.

Overeating is not the problem. It is the symptom.

Overeating has little to do with willpower!

Why is it that we find ourselves eating more than we think we should or make unhealthy choices despite “knowing better?” How is it that we eat a meal and hardly remember what it tasted like?

Stress desensitizes the pleasure response in the body. When we experience stress, the body is programmed to go into fight or flight, making it hyper aware of its own pain as a survival mechanism. Decreasing sensitivity to pleasure will increase sensitivity to pain. (This is why deep relaxed breathing reduces awareness to pain.)

Without pleasure we can’t physiologically enjoy the foods that we eat. Stress shuts down digestion so the neural connection between the gut and brain is severed. Without this connection, the brain can’t radiate pleasure to the gut and the gut can’t signal fullness to the brain. When we feel full in the belly but the mouth still wants more, the connection between gut and brain is impaired.

When calm, we are able to connect to the parts of the brain that govern wisdom and reasoning around food and digestion. Under stress, this part of the brain containing the knowledge of what foods make us feel good, what makes us bloated, what energizes us, or what gives us a headache is neurologically isolated. When the survival part of the brain is activated and the connection between gut and brain is impaired, it is neurologically harder for us to listen to the wisdom around which food types or quantities make us feel more guilt than pleasure in the long run.

Pleasure helps regulate our appetite. When the body feels pleasure, the brain is able to communicate to the gut the right amount of food that will maintain pleasure. When under stress we can’t feel the pleasure so we eat more in search of it.

Overeating is not about willpower. We simply don’t have the proper physiology to register what we’re eating and how much. When stressed, the body requires more food to taste the sense of pleasure.

Stress is not bad: it is natural. Often it keeps us on our growing edge. Detrimental stress is the self-induced kind created either by our thoughts or by holding on to stress that is no longer prevalent.

We are naturally self-correcting beings and we can physiologically produce powerful healing in the body by learning to modulate our frame of mind and heart.

As a start, make sure to improve your conditions around meals. Fast eating activates stress, multi-tasking when eating causes stress, negative self-talk or judging your food (“this food is bad for me”) equals stress and equating food as fat or viewing it as the enemy is ultimately stressful eating.

Making our meals more relaxed can be as simple as adding 5 minutes to breakfast, taking 5 breaths before and after each meal or turning off the computer at lunch.

Fast eating is a reflection of fast living, i.e. living in a way that is not always self-nourishing. When we slow down, we connect to feeling. The switch in our brain that turns on relaxation turns on digestion and body wisdom. We can be eating healthy foods, but if we eat them in stress or judgment, we change our metabolic chemistry.

Where else do we move too fast? Usually we are too fast in our interactions with others- a true sign of not being present.