Eating is, despite what you may think, a very complex behavior. It is complex because we not only eat out of a sensation of physical hunger, but we also experience other types of hunger that also lead us to eat and of which we are often not aware.
Physical hunger is the type of hunger most physiological. It occurs when our system detects that nutrients are lacking and moves us to get them through eating. It is easily identifiable through sensations in the stomach, feeling of weakness, etc ... Through the behavior of eating we get recharged with energy and physiological hunger disappears.
Sensory hunger is a different type of hunger. As the name suggests, they have a special relevance the senses, especially the smell, the taste, the sight and the hearing, but also the touch.
The sight of a chocolate cake, the crunchy sound of some potatoes, the smell of a tangerine, the taste of curry, the touch of the skin of a peach ... all these sensory stimuli can make you want to eat or want to continue eating even though no physiological hunger.
There is also a type of hunger emotional call. Some call it emotional eating, emotional eating, emotional eating, etc..
The act of eating, due to the palatability of food in the mouth and also to the activation of the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system through the behavior of swallowing, has the potential to change our emotional state: rewarding and relaxing; that's why, intuitively, we sometimes eat when we're anxious or bored.
Mental hunger, however, is less talked about. As psychologists who regularly work with people with Nutrition and Eating Disorders, we know that the role of thought in relation to food is fundamental. In part this is so because many emotions are preceded by thoughts. There are certain types of thoughts that psychologists recognize as risky for developing an unwanted relationship with food.
We think that comparison is a process, in most cases (although not all), not very friendly. Comparing your body with an ideal of beauty, or with the body of someone from your family, institute or work, rather than causing motivation to change, generates stress, tension and frustration.
Can lead you to extreme behaviors at mealtime, such as fast diets or fasts, in an attempt to adjust as soon as possible to an ideal. These types of thoughts of comparison with an ideal do not usually lead to kind, thoughtful, and sensible decisions or long-term plans to improve our health..
A disturbing relationship with food can be created by a dichotomous vision based on the success-failure binomial. If your thoughts and feelings oscillate in a very extreme way depending on whether or not you have fulfilled certain purposes related to food or achieved certain body weights or volumes, mental hunger is playing tricks on you and, in addition to generating instability and discomfort, it opens the door to eating disorders.
Perfectionistic thoughts also influence eating. They are very demanding thoughts that, either can cause discouragement and abandonment of a healthy lifestyle thinking that everything is wrong and we are not going to achieve our goals, or they can cause rigid behaviors in relation to food that increase the probability of suffering anorexia or vigorexia.
The perception about our body can be adjusted or skewed. Sometimes, there is a part of us that we dislike and it may be the case that we come to focus only on it, losing sight of the whole. This can lead to extreme diets when our weight no longer requires it simply because the desired part does not reduce its volume. This can put us in danger.
Many media outlets try to make us believe that an expensive car, silky hair or a "perfect" body will give us happiness and solve our problems. Many ads appeal to the most fundamental emotions to sell. However, of course, our happiness will not depend on our appearance but, if we believe it, we will take perhaps inappropriate and unproductive measures to achieve our goals.
Sometimes we are very identified with our thoughts, to the point of thinking that, just because we think something we believe it to be true. In eating disorders this is very common: "I think I am fat, then I am, otherwise I would not think so". This, however, is a cognitive distortion called emotional reasoning, that can lead to inappropriate eating behaviors.
There are mental rules that can also greatly influence our diet: "I am not going to wear a bikini until I weigh 54 kg", or "I am not going to meet my friends until I am muscular and defined". These thoughts generate extreme pressure and, rather than helping you achieve your goals, they will probably cause one of two effects: abandoning your purposes or taking them beyond what is healthy.
The liberating effect of abstinence on something that we had proposed, again can cause the effects on food that we have commented: since I have skipped everything it does not matter how I have skipped it now I have to go even more extreme to make up for.
These types of thoughts can provoke that we do not correctly detect our current physiological hunger or satiety signals that are reaching our body when we are eating.
As you have seen, all these ways of thinking have a great influence on our eating behavior and it is worth dusting them off and detecting them to be aware of the reasons that lead us to make decisions related to food..
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