The BodyKind Project
“Understanding the Interaction between Emotions and Food”
Have you ever noticed that stress from a deadline makes you feel hungrier? Or maybe have you ever experienced a breakup that left you with little to no appetite? The two words “emotion” and “food” may seem completely unrelated, but they actually come into conjunction in many situations and along a spectrum. If you reflect on your own experiences, you may realize how your emotions and behaviors around food influences one another. In everyday scenarios, you may remember a time when you had no appetite at all after arguing with your loved ones, or maybe when a tender and moist cake to celebrate birthdays, both of which document the engagement of our eating behaviors with our emotions, and are considered as normal emotional-food interactions.
However, on the other end of the continuum, there also exists more maladaptive and persistent emotion-food behaviors, such as restricting to eat due to one’s personal fears towards weight-gain of their body or uncontrollable binge eating under stressful conditions. A prolonged abnormal relationship between emotions and food may serve as precursors of the development of clinical eating disorders which incorporate Anorexia Nervosa (AN), the restrictive kind, and Bulimia Nervosa (BN) or Binge Eating Disorders (BED), the unmanageable kind. Therefore, learning and moderating the problematic connections are crucial in doing prevention work before the formation of clinical eating disorders. Whether these experiences may belong to your own or someone important in your life, comprehending the driving causes are the first step in breaking the fall.
Your emotions can be both pleasant (positive affect) and distressful (negative affect). Yet, it is often the interaction of distressful emotions and food that leads to unhealthy tendencies of eating. Individuals experience emotional distresses when they feel discomforting psychologically, namely when being depressed, anxious, ashamed, emotionally unstable, and overwhelmed. The emergence of these negative eating behaviors shouldn’t be attributed to the individual, as adverse emotional experiences are a part of human nature, but rather it is because of the constant disruption of the Emotional Regulation (ER) system. You might have heard of this system before, it is the system that involves people’s attempts in changing their emotions after experiencing a gap between their ideal emotion and the emotion that the real situation has triggered. The unexpected or even unwanted emotions would seek an outlet, in this case on expressions towards food, once the system that originally directs it breaks down.
Body image concerns, or so called body anxiety, is especially prevalent. It is a problematic psychological state that could potentially lead to maladaptive eating behaviors when encountered with the dysfunction of a person’s ER system. In detail, it includes any detrimental view (perceptual), feelings (affective), thoughts (cognitive), and actions (behavioral) towards the way their bodies look and its shape. These concerns trigger feelings of shame, anxiety and worthlessness which are displayed when someone performs frequent body-checking, preoccupation by weight and food, body comparisons with others and guilt after eating. Your everyday environments can vastly contribute to these behaviors. Our intimate association with social media nowadays plays a significant role in contributing to the formation of body anxiety, where people are pervasively exposed to unrealistic aesthetic standards. Of course, there are also other contributors such as influences from family members and peers, as well as athletic commitments. In addition to external stressors, body dissatisfaction may serve as a concrete and physical outlet for the unregulated emotions, manifesting the failure of the system.
What’s more is that the connection between emotion and food is not one directional, like how distressing affects can influence irregular eating, but rather bidirectional. As one engages with restrictive eating, rising fatigueness and malnutrition issues may destabilize one’s moods even further. Similarly, people who struggle to feel in control of their eating are often further entrenched in their low mood cycles. Because of the mutually affecting relationship, the significance to not only maintain well-regulated emotions but also a predictable eating pattern becomes evident.
For this purpose, The BodyKind Project is designed to bolster your mental wellbeing and help prevent any undesired eating relationships with food, whether it is stress-related eating, food guilt, or out of control eating. Through light and gentle tools from dancing to grounding exercises, our approach aims to improve emotional-wellbeing in day-to-day life and experiences around food. As you explore this journey, we invite you to become more aware of the ways your emotions and eating patterns interact.
"Reconnect Through Mindfulness and Movement"
After having a better understanding of the inseparable connection between your emotions, potential body image concerns and unhealthy eating behaviors, spending time to identify what lies beneath the undesired experiences helps us to prevent these behaviors with intention. You have now realized that these unhealthy eating habits, as well as the thoughts on your body image, are burdens resulting from the collapsed emotional regulation system that otherwise would handle your negative emotions without redirecting them on seemingly more concrete aspects like the way you eat or the way you view your body. Therefore, our next step is to focus on discovering alternative ways to handle these unwanted affects when our ER does not function properly in order to stop them from burdening our eating habits and thoughts.
The BodyKind Project incorporated the use of mindful breathing exercises, grounding techniques, and guided movement practices to stabilize the connection between your mind and body, ultimately seeking another outlet for your emotions. In this article, you would be able to explore the fundamental mechanisms of how movement practices and breathing exercises assist the enhancement of your eating behaviors and restore trust within your body in addition to serving as the manual ER system.
Because body image distortion and concerns are caused by the combination of conflicts from a psychological aspect, such as your emotions, to a more physical aspect, like your body shape, it often demonstrates a disconnection with reality psychophysically. Through practicing dance and movements, you will experience the expression from both your brain and your body. More importantly, while expressing, they would be able to meet each other, coming into unity to overcome the disconnection with reality psychophysically.
Coupling mindful practices, such as breathing exercises and grounding techniques, with guided movement sessions would create a more favorable eating habit on top of the healthy relationship that has just built with your body through dancing. This is because mindful practices, in general, can heighten your sensational capacity, enabling them to better notice, observe, and feel their emotions, instead of automatically reacting and finding a release to it. Regarding eating-specific cues, engaging in mindful breathing have been proved to have an effect on building a higher awareness of hunger, fullness, and satiety, which would prevent you from eating when feeling out-of-control.
Thank you for reading. Ready to step on your journey with BodyKind? Explore our guided sections that include breathing exercises, grounding practices, movement sessions, reflective journaling prompts, and nourishing resources all in the menu tabs! Welcome to BodyKind—we're so glad you've found your way here.