HOW ARE YOU
DEPRIVED?
Your relationship to food can be an expression of what is missing in your
life. Many expressions utilize food metaphors to describe a feeling of
yearning. Hungry for love. Starving for
attention.
- Loneliness can feel like emptiness, and
food symbolically fills the void.
- If you feel sad and in need of comfort
but nobody is there to console you adequately, you may turn to food to
provide a feeling of comfort.
- If you’re in an unsatisfying
relationship, you might turn to food to satisfy your unmet needs. Alternately, you might restrict food to
express the deprivation.
- If you’re in a situation you can’t
control, you may focus on your powerlessness over food instead of feeling
powerless in the situation. Or you
might restrict food to give yourself a sense of control.
WHAT DO YOU WANT MORE OF IN YOUR LIFE?
Do you have enough friends?
Do you want more loving, nurturing, comforting people in your life?
Do you need more power over aspects of your life?
Do you need more money?
More happiness?
More time?
By getting in touch with what you want more of in your life, you may stop
turning to food to express your internal hunger.
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Legal Disclaimer: The content on this site is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as psychotherapy or as a substitute for psychotherapy advice, diagnosis or treatment.
20 comments:
I've just been single a long time. I think that my parents taught me to be too picky and now I'm alone. I wish I wouldn't have passed up opportunities to date nice men. I'm lonely, and sick of being single but don't feel good enough for anyone.
Loneliness often is a reason for me to want to seek comfort in high-fat foods. Dairy is one of my hugest weaknesses. Too much of it is not good.
I often feel lonely and I am enduring some financial hardship. It makes me want to eat when I feel anxious about it.
Financial hardship or heartbreak can make me want to eat more. I sometimes feel so lazy because I don't exercise enough either.
An indirectly-related issue is instead of calling a friend to choice me for lunch or dinner I wind up going alone. I don't know why. It's easier to face possible rejection or find out they are too busy for me. So, I go alone. I'm mentioning this because it seems easier for me to just go eat by myself than it is to actually face the "real world" and recognize that people are undependable sometimes as far as when I need companionship. Does this make sense? Eating is something I'm used to doing alone, not with others-not since I was living at home with my mom.
This makes sense to me. I've lost a considerable amount of weight in the past year. Still, I often find myself thinking it's easier just to go to a restaurant or cafe by myself than to call a friend to go with me. On the other hand, going alone leaves an open door for meeting new people.
This is slightly personal but sometimes I would use food to make up for times when I felt unfulfilled after what is supposed to be an intimate moment. :( Sometimes I would be afraid to hurt a guy's feelings if there is more I need from him in that area.
I think I feel self-conscious about learning disabilities that slow me down in the workplace. It gets me depressed sometimes.
I'm glad you brought this up. It can be tough for a woman to ask for what she needs from a man, especially when it comes to sex. I worry about hurting his feelings sometime.
My binging started quite a few years ago when I felt rejected by this person I was head over heals in love with. I felt bad about the overeating, so then I started purging because it made me feel cleaner. The purging was also a way for me to feel cleaner because I felt bad and dirty every time I gave myself sexually to someone.
Sometimes I feel all of the above. Right now I feel unhappy, lonely, and broke.
I feel sad after a recent breakup. Therefore, I've been eating more than I would like.
I just had a new thought. I think sometimes I feel like I can't depend on other people to meet my needs, but that I can always depend on food. This is a false sense of security I do realize, but this is how I feel sometimes.
I definitely need to get more in touch with what I want out of life as well as what I want more of in life. I'm still in the process of deciding that.
I always felt pressured as a child to be the prettiest and to be the best at everything. I was keeping this up until I started having health problems because of starving myself. I have a hard time connecting with people without being competitive because my parents were both very much in the spotlight and still are.
I have often felt lonely. I now try to find activities and/or people to hang around so that I don't feel so alone.
This makes so much more sense than expected. I often feel so out of control. I swing between restriction of foods and wanting to gorge.
This could very well why people "cling" to food. It's always there-and it does cause me to feel secure but only for a few moments.
Being on this fence is so hard. We are taught as we are young we deserve someone who will treat us right. However, it's so hard to find people who treat others right, so sometimes we settle for someone who might destroy our sense of self-worth, or just be alone and lonely.
This sounds like me-the last line of this blog post. I have no idea what I want for my life.
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