The Truth About Comfort Eating

Comfort eating is cited as being an issue lying behind somebody’s weight problem.

However, it’s important to be aware as to exactly what comfort eating is and what it isn’t. If comfort eating is a problem for you, then being aware of what’s going on will help you have power over it and feel more in control. 

From the dawn of history, food and good times have been linked.

 It’s not comfort eating to enjoy eating a bit of birthday cake at your friend’s party, even though eating the cake will be associated with feeling happy and will be part of the general fun of the celebration. 

The problem here comes when you try to capture the feeling associated with a party by eating party food even when you’re not celebrating anything – that is comfort eating.

There is also a physical side to the link between food and emotions.

When we are low on blood sugar and hungry, we tend to feel pretty terrible. It varies from person to person..

but when we haven’t eaten for a while, we get grumpy, snappy, more prone to worry, a bit more emotional and prone to tearfulness and so forth. 

Where comfort eating comes in is when we use food as a way to help us feel better when we feel tired, irritable, stressed or upset for some other reason, i.e. when hunger isn’t the cause of our bad temper and anxiety. 

Our childhood experiences and things that happened in the past can also have an effect on the way we view food and the way it makes us feel. 

Often, this is one of the things that will be explored in a hypnotherapy session for weight loss.

Eating is an obvious pleasure for children and parents often use it as a tool to help their children learn. 

Food can also be used by parents as a comforting tool and as a way of showing love.

This combination of giving food as well as comfort can continue long past infancy, and a parent can give a hurt or sad child food (which usually tends to be sweet – I’ve never heard of a parent giving a crying child cheese) along with the cuddle to “cheer you up and make you feel better”.

This behaviour may linger when we are adults, and we may seek out sweets as a comfort if we can’t get the cuddles.

If you think you are suffering from this bad behaviour, ask help now…

Learn more about the downside of comfort eating at

http://positivetranceformations.com.au