Emotional Eating in Miami
In a supermarket in Florida, I grew hungry for all my eyes saw—for the sugary buttery smells. As I sailed through the aisles as if I had arrived in a food kingdom, I said only half joking, ‘I want that sugary maple doughnut, that croissant, the whipped cream, the ice cream, the pasta, the sausages, the cake.’ In my kryptonite state, I walked with some difficulty with an isometric pull towards the breakfast items I’d come in here for—milk, teabags, fruit, and eggs.
I fell for the neatly laid trap of impulse buying close to the till, a chocolate chip cookie with enough calories for two days, and M&Ms, paid and fled feeling like a former smoker who has had a pull of a cigarette.
When I was a smoker, an anaemic one at that, I knew the cigarette would make me dizzy, turn my mouth to ash, my eyes would sting.
I knew the toxins in the cigarette was exposing my body to more than 7,000 chemicals, compounds, and carcinogens, setting myself up for a horrible death, of cancer in my lungs, every part of my body; I knew the cigarette would damage my blood vessels, increase my risk of stroke, aortic aneurysm, and heart attack. I knew all this and yet, like every addict, I lit up again and again.
I am just one victim of the hundreds of millions of tobacco companies who successfully packaged cigarettes as sexy, hooked us, and killed us. Only a few people have successfully sued tobacco companies.
Junk food is the same. The sugar, salt, and fat in it is as addictive as tobacco. We are hardwired to reach for the fried cheesecake, the glazed doughnuts, the fried chicken dripping in fat. Every bit of research howls at us: Junk food is linked to a higher risk of obesity, depression, digestive issues, heart disease, and stroke, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and early death. Yet we reach for it again and again.
The difference between the two, smoking and junk food, is this—There are taxes and grisly reminders on cigarette packets of our fate if we smoke. There is the treating of smokers like pariahs in public spaces. But junk food is still a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
It’s everywhere, served at parties, displayed attractively at groceries, marketed as cheap, convenient, and tasty. Worse. It’s a lucrative weapon of destruction by the exploitation of human weakness by grocers and manufacturers.
It’s the pork at 1.99 with enough fat to clog the hearts of an entire family. It’s the corned beef of cancer. It’s the one dollar for a dozen glazed doughnuts sugar of arthritis and inflammation. Just like cigarettes was never about free choice, neither is junk food. It’s a drug paraded as a free choice by Machiavellian manufacturers who prey upon human vulnerabilities.
Ironically the poorer, the more uneducated, the more emotionally unstable the consumer, the more susceptible he or she is to eating poison trussed up as goodies.
Junk food and drink are consumed not only at a huge personal cost to citizens, wreaking havoc on their health and pockets but is also a drain on the State as people clog up hospitals and bleed budgets with preventable diseases.
We need to demand a tax on junk food the way lobbies have managed to do with cigarettes, and regulation from manufacturers who sell products packed with saturated fats, sugar, and salt.
The Government must subsidise our farmers and healthy fruit, vegetables, nuts, and lean meats and use its media and schools to educate our people suffering with amongst the highest rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and hypertension worldwide.
We ultimately eat or not eat as a way of self-medicating. I realised this in a series of yoga classes last year. In one class I complimented an overweight woman. “Its great you’re coming so often to yoga. You’re looking slimmer,” I said. She said, putting me in my place, “I didn’t come here to lose weight. I came here to get strong.”
I made the mistake a second time, asking another woman who had rapidly dropped weight over a few weeks how she did it. “You look great, tiny, fit.” The woman said, “I get like this when I’m depressed. I once dropped to 70 pounds and was on a suicide watch.” Our health is not about food, I saw then. It’s about our hungry untended hearts. It’s about searching for love and safe spaces. Perhaps it’s time to reach for our hungry hearts instead of the cookie jar.