Over Eating to Hide Your Emotions

Behavior Modification

What if you were a fifteen year old girl that was dealing with many issues and pressures, and the only thing that you could turn to was food. Not knowing how to deal with your emotions and all of the stress in your life in a healthy manner, you begin to uncontrollably eat.This leads to you being overweight which creates more struggles, so you continue to eat to cover that pain. This is a continuous cycle that many face.The article Binge Eating and Weight Control: The Role of Experiential Avoidance examines the relationship between emotions and overeating which leads to an increase of overweight and obese people in America.

In the United States, two thirds of the adults are overweight and this number is steadily increasing. There are many negative effects that people that are overweight and obese face. Health problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease can be lumped into one major effect. Another outcome of this increase rise of obesity is direct health costs and loss of production. When factoring all of their expenses, people have to think about medication, procedures and surgeries, hospitalization, home care treatment and other expenses Many that are disabled are also disconnected from the world.

Experiential avoidance, which is attempts to avoid thoughts, feelings, memories, or other experiences even when doing this the outcome becomes harmful, is a problem that many people face on a daily basis. Binge eating is put in this category.Binge eating is defined as a pattern of disordered eating which consists of episodes of uncontrollable eating. This is an indicator of of psychological problems. This results in consuming an excessive amount of food.Many times people binge eat because they are feeling depressed or have anxieties or are just plain bored. This is a cycle that repeats itself continuously.

            Even though there are weight loss programs that emphasize proper diet and exercise that are successful in producing weight loss, they are not effective in long term treatment. Usually half of the weight that is lost is regained in the first year. Within three to five years after treatment, eighty percent would have either went back to their starting weight or even exceeded that number.Often times the ending result is that people are still overweight. Acceptance and Commitment therapy also known as ACT is a cognitive therapy that uses tactics to target experiential avoidance through a combination of behavioral change processes. Some of these methods are mindfulness, acceptance, and values. The question arises of whether you can treat binge eating and other psychiatric problems by focusing on experiential avoidance.
            A study was conducted that compared a one day ACT workshop that emphasized these techniques to 83 participants that already had received a weight loss intervention. These people had completed at least six months of a weight-loss program. The ACT workshop was for six hours. There they discussed different techniques that were changed or modified from the original ACT book to fit the circumstances and issues that were related to weight loss and maintaining this weight loss. These teachings included mindfulness, acceptance, defusion skills that are associated to eating, body image, and self-stigma.The intervention also clarified life values such as those that are related to health and relationships. They also examined barriers to staying on track with the weight loss and they also created behavioral commitments that related to their life values. At the beginning of the trial all of the observers weight and height was recorded by standardized equipment. They also filled out a questionnaire that reported their age, gender, and ethnicity. Binge eating was self reported through the question “ On average, how many days per week did you have a binge?” In the study the definition of binge was an episode of eating large quantities of food during a short period of time and having a feeling of being out of control. The results showed that weight loss and maintenance and the quality of life after three months had improved a great amount to the participants that had attended the workshop.

The results showed that emotions and eating are linked together.The study’s data revealed that higher levels of experiential avoidance predicted self-reporting overeating. People use food as a tool to regulate their emotions.

In today’s society, all around you there are images of what a successful person should be. One pressure that is more common to women but not just limited to them, is the pressure of weight and being the perfect size.Many people think that they cannot be happy just being who they are. Being that many have all of these anxieties they turn to food. This is why it is so important for people to make sure that they express their thoughts and feelings because there is a correlation between experiential avoidance and binge eating.

P.S. Whenever you are feeling down you can listen to this song and it might uplift your spirit. Born this way by Lady GAGA