Emotional Eating is a Hoax: Part 1

Emotional eating is a hoax. North America is obese because of sugar addiction, NOT emotional eating. Why is this so? This is so because because sugar is more addictive than cocaine or heroin. If you can get off refined white sugar, you can get back control of your health and your life. It's that simple. Do you think emotional eating is the reason why you are mildly overweight or fully obese? Lots of people, who try to function in today's stressed out world, believe they eat in response to stress. So many people believe that if they could just get stress under control that they could get their weight under control. Nothing could be further from the truth. All the dieting commercials and ads all tell you, over and over again, that we eat in response to stress or we are emotional eaters or we have no control over ourselves. This is a hoax and I found out the truth. If you would like to know the truth about emotional eating, eating in response to stress, stress and weight gain or stress and weight loss, then READ ON.... Let me back up a little first. There is no question that we can all become victims of emotional eating from time to time and there is no question that most of us eat out of habit some of the time. We tend to be depressed and stressed out much of the time and those of us that don't indulge with food, probably cope with stress by smoking or gambling or some other equally destructive behavior. However, the shocking fact is that these two issues - emotional eating and habitual eating are very small issues compared to the primary reason why we are all so FAT. It may be emotional eating or habitual eating that got you started on the road to obesity, they are not what is keeping you FAT. North America is not obese because of our uncontrollable emotions or bad habits. North America is fat, obese, overweight, chubby, pudgy, heavy, chunky (or whatever you want to call it) because of something called HYPERPHAGIA. NO, that is not a swear word. It's pronounced "Hi-per-fay-ja." This is a rather fancy sounding scientific word, which simply means uncontrollable hunger. We all suffer from hyperphagia, which is a scientific or medical problem, not an emotional eating problem. Now, don't get me wrong. I used to buy into the whole diet world, too. I've been on Weight Watchers, NutriSystem, Jenny Craig, the South Beach Diet and a whole host of other weight loss plans. I definitely spent a lot of money over the years trying to conquer my advancing weight problem. I had success at different times, just like most people, but each and every time (you know the drill) I gained it all back and then some. Then I learned about HYPERPHAGIA. Which came first...the chicken or the egg? The truth, about food, stress and emotional eating actually has more to do with science than anything else. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, you must first get food under control and then you will be able to get stress under control, not the other way around. Weight gain or weight loss, whichever way you want to look at it has more to do with stress and blood sugar than emotional eating. Now, I'm not talking about emotional stress here, I'm talking about something called oxidative stress. Here’s how that works. FIRST, comes a crazy sugar-filled diet. You eat sugar-coated or sugar-filled everything including white bread, white flour, white potatoes, white rice, white pasta, candy, cakes, pastries, pop tarts and white pizza dough (you get the idea). SECOND, comes an uncontrollable sugar addiction called hyperphagia that keeps you a slave to cravings for more sugar (also know as simple carbohydrates). This is very different from emotional eating. THIRD, comes a messed up pancreas (a very important organ in your body) that gets busy trying to produce enough hormones (insulin) to deal with all the sugar you are stuffing into your body. By the way, the more insulin you produce, the less glucagon (another hormone) you produce. Insulin makes you store fat. Glucagon makes you burn fat. You definitely want more glucagon than insulin, not the other way around. FOURTH, comes a pancreas that doesn't work so good anymore. It's tired and it's worn out. Like the elves in Santa's workshop, your pancreas has been so busy trying to process all the sugar that you eat that now it just needs a long winter's rest. The only problem is that unlike Santa's elves, you need your pancreas to work all the time without taking a rest - EVER. If it does, you become diabetic. FIFTH, comes a vicious cycle of over-working your pancreas and constantly spiking your blood sugar all the time. This vicious cycle creates free radicals and free radicals, left unchecked, create oxidative stress. It's oxidative stress that eventually damages your pancreas so much that it stops working. It's oxidative stress that causes all of the damage, not emotional stress and emotional eating. This whole process, just like a defiant two-year old, makes you resistant to your insulin. Then the pancreas has to make even more insulin to deal with the same amount of sugar as before and the cycle goes on and on and on. Before you know it, you are obese and you can't even understand how it happened. Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article. For more information or to read the full article, go to Emotional Eating is a Hoax!