Haunted by Food You Didn’t Get to Eat

You’ve probably heard of emotional eating, which happens when you turn to food as a coping mechanism for emotional support. Although at the time, you may think you just need or crave something to eat. That is the catch 22 of emotional eating. You aren’t eating to relieve the emotions you are consciously aware of. You are eating to suppress the feelings you are unconsciously pushing away. You may know you aren’t happy before you dig into your favorite comfort foods, but you may not really know the depths of your unhappiness or the associated unmet needs.

For some people part of their unhappiness and unmet needs can be traced back to an experience with food, where they were denied something they needed or wanted. This experience can be fairly recent or date back to your childhood even if it was fifty or sixty years ago. In fact the further back it goes for you the more powerful the emotions around it can be, because it has been festering and kept suppressed for such a long time. That deprivation becomes something you are unconsciously trying to make up for, and coupled with this unmet need is the one thing that is keeping you from ever feeling satiated and resolved the shadow of the enforcer that is silently judging you again and again when you succumb to doing what you were told you shouldn’t do. Is this happening with you?

I’ll share a few stories that may help you understand just how this happens.

In one of my audiences, an older fellow said he couldn’t seem to stop eating desserts at night. He didn’t understand why that was, since he got plenty to eat at dinner and during the day. I asked him whether he always had a lot of dessert with dinner growing up, because it could be a food association of having dessert with dinner or eating a lot of dessert as a habitual pattern. He said no, he’d grown up during the war when food was rationed and he almost never got to have dessert. For him dessert was a rarity and something to eat as much of as he could because he didn’t know when he would get it next. Part of him, at a subconscious level, didn’t know if or when he would get dessert again, even though at a conscious level he knew he would have it the next day.

A client of mine also grew up during the war and both of her parents worked. As a result her mother couldn’t cook a big family meal very often. On those rare occasions, the family dinner was a food feast and a grab fest. She and her many siblings would try to get as much food as they could before the others got it first, and they would gorge themselves on a meal they knew was seldom made. All these years later she was still overeating whenever she sat down to a large meal with a group of people, unconsciously recreating an experience in her past.

Some of my female clients were denied food and forced to diet as children because that is what their mothers did and what their moms felt was necessary to keep them slim. Food was an obsession in their households and so too was the continual feeling of hunger and deprivation. The outcome differs for each of them. One never felt she could eat enough and struggled with bingeing. One fasted and binged in a perpetual roller coaster that left her depleted and anxious. One tried every diet that has come along and felt inadequate because she wasn’t thin enough. One other deprived herself habitually in more ways than with food. And another became anorexic.

One of my male clients never got to eat the foods he loved as a kid, so when he got access to them he indulged. As an adult he continued to indulge, even in things that made him sick.

Are you compelled to eat comfort or forbidden foods, unable to stop eating even when you are full, doubling up on portions, or losing control around certain foods or situations involving food. If so, take an interest in why that might be, without judging yourself for it. The judgment won’t allow you to dig a little deeper to uncover what is unconsciously driving your behavior. It may just be a past deprivation, one that you grew up with or a more recent experience from dieting.

Alice Greene is president of Feel Your Personal Best, a healthy lifestyle coaching company located in Newburyport, MA. Contact her at agreene@feelyourpersonalbest.com or 978-465-3555×5.