One more piece to the overeating puzzle: The Emotional Hunger Scale. In my last couple of blog entries, I’ve discussed the physical hunger scale and keeping a Super Powerful Eating Journal. So if you’ve been using those tools, you’re beginning to identify your thoughts and feelings around eating. To make this even clearer, I teach the Emotional Hunger Scale. Here is where life can get tricky. It looks just like the Physical Hunger Scale with a zero in the middle and numbers from 1 to 10 radiating out on either side (+ numbers to the right and – numbers to the left). Only this time, those numbers represent how you FEEL. When you are up in the plus numbers, you are humming along. Up to a +8? You must be just about walking on air!
But then, there are those minus numbers and this is what we want to take a look at here. This is when your spirits droop, then drop lower. Maybe someone delivers a bit of news that is like a punch in the gut and you drop right down to a -6 on that emotional scale. But wait, does your brain know the difference between a -6 on the emotional hunger scale and a -6 on the physical hunger scale? You get bad news, ugh right in your solar plexus and your brain says, “better eat something, we’re at a -6.”
Every overeater out there is an emotional eater, guaranteed. After a while, our brain no longer can identify between an emotional low or an actual physical need to feed. The truth is, if you are at a minus number on the emotional hunger scale, no amount of food is going to fix that. This would be the evening that you find yourself going from cookie to popcorn, scouring the kitchen for the one thing that will do it for you. But nothing satisfies, because it is an emotional need – not a physical need.
The only thing that food can fix is hunger. That’s it. If you are not physically hungry, but looking to eat something – that “need” for something is not going to go away by eating. It is a good time to sit down with a tablet of paper and start writing down every thought that pops in your mind. Keep writing as quickly as you can without trying to “judge” your thoughts. See if you find the thought that is causing you to feel empty emotionally. Now you can decide how to truly fill that need instead of overfilling your stomach and still feeling emotionally down (or worse!).
