By Maria Julieta Colomer
Continuously eating small amounts of sweets, carbohydrates and fat, and getting up at midnight to rummage through the fridge are some of the acts that specialists constitute “emotional hunger”, a concept that characterizes the behavior of people resorting to food as an escape route in a situation of emotional stress.
The idea refers to “when we eat for emotions”, as defined by Analía Yamaguchi, a clinical doctor and nutrition specialist at the Italian Hospital in Buenos Aires, for whom there is a “real hunger” and an “emotional” one.
“The first – he added – is a physiological process that appears slowly and following eating, it disappears. The second, on the other hand, appears abruptly and, in general, is selective towards foods rich in sugar, carbohydrates and fats. It’s a mental and emotional process.”
For her part, Laura Oliva, a specialist in clinical nutrition and an expert in metabolic diseases, commented to Télam that “it was following the publication in 2021 of a study on the ‘Phenotyping of obesity’ carried out by the Ecuadorian gastroenterologist Andrés Acosta, from the Mayo Clinic, that the concept ’emotional hunger’ acquired an objectifiable entity».
«If appetite was previously alluded to and related to certain triggers or ‘triggers’, such as happiness or sadness, it is from this classification of obesity that people began to talk regarding eating behaviors. These are: hyperphagic behavior, when we cannot stop eating; hedonic behavior, related to pleasure; and emotional hunger, associated with stress and emotions”, argued Oliva.
In the opinion of Ignacio Porras, a graduate in Nutrition and president of Fundación Sanar, “what we call ’emotional hunger’ is the symptom of those people who channel stress through food.”
Porras observed that “people not only eat when we are hungry; sometimes we do it without having an appetite or, sometimes, we deprive ourselves of eating despite having it. This leads to the generation of eating disorders.
«We are permanently related to food by being immersed in a food system that promotes different consumptions that create their own eating pattern in each person, whether due to previous experiences, access to food or not, identification cultural, and due to environmental issues that can trigger anxiety situations in some people,” Porras reflected.
Liliana Albarenga consulted her nutritionist when she noticed that it became recurring, simultaneously with work problems that caused her stress, to get up at dawn to eat, she said, “whatever she found in the fridge”; a habit that affects more and more people and that specialists call “emotional hunger” and that can lead to nutritional disorders if not treated in time.
Albarenga (47 years old) was looking for something of what Porras mentioned, who had to consult his nutritionist following noticing that work tensions made him get up at dawn to eat “whatever he found in the fridge.”
“Due to the pressures of my work,” he told this agency, “the stress activated a compulsion to eat at night in me, which I had never had before. It took me a long time to whiten it out and assimilate it because my eating behavior during the day is still normal, I even exercise, but during the night I binge and eat a lot, especially sweets.”
Indeed, according to the psychiatrist and therapist Juana Poulisis, “when we seek to calm our anxiety through certain foods, they function as a regulator, which dampens and anesthetizes feelings of anguish and emptiness, but in the short term.”
“In reality, nobody eats a salad in a stressful situation,” Porras insisted.
Luna Segovia, 19, who had suffered from anorexia when she was 15, began to eat compulsively during the pandemic and gained a lot of weight.
“In therapy I worked on what might have triggered my sudden desire to eat,” he told Télam. And he added: “I think several things added up, I was regarding to finish high school, and with my family we were moving to another country, so I had to prepare to take exams abroad. I think that all this, added to the health situation since I was isolated from my friends, made me anxious.
Poulisis warned that “if the behavior of compulsive, emotional eating, with binge eating and snacking is repeated and maintained over time, it will generate more anguish, more guilt, difficulties with weight, depression and isolation.”
In general, emotional hunger does not appear out of nowhere or just because. Some specialists maintain that there is a biological predisposition related to the structure of the brain in certain people. Others, on the other hand, postulate the intervention of multiple factors such as the social environment, the environment, cultural identifications, rewards and punishments.
«In many cases it arises as a consequence of having gone through one of the ‘restrictive diets’ that impose as a fashion ‘skipping meals’, or an ‘intermittent fasting’; eat less or consume ‘diet’ products. In response to these prohibitions, binge eating occurs as the opposite effect, generating excessive behavior,” Poulisis analyzed.
For the specialist, “binge eating, which is the psychological term with which we name this type of diagnosis, can also appear in people who have psychiatric disorders, mood disorders, depression, post-traumatic stress or unresolved situations, as an abuse, for example ».
«When in the office, nutritionists, we analyze the eating behavior of our patients, we explore the ‘triggers’ that unleash these disordered behaviors and, many times, we refer them to psychotherapy, understanding that only from coping with a particular emotional situation , it will be possible to help regulate such eating behavior,” said Oliva.
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