Did you know that the relationship we have with food is linked to our weight. This makes sense, what I decide to eat or stop eating affects my weight in the long run. However, that relationship is affected by several factors. For example, how I feel when I eat certain foods and what foods I choose to eat depending on my mood, are all ways of relating to food. These relationships we have with the food we eat lead us to have changes in weight or not.

Results from studies in both children and adults have shown that the more emotional over-eating a person does, that is, the more they eat due to negative emotions such as being sad, angry or frustrated, the higher the body weight they present. It does not matter how old you are, whether you are an angry and bored schoolboy, who does not know how to control his bad mood and temper, or an adult woman who is sad because she has not been able to follow a diet, angry with her partner or tired from excess work load, both of these individuals will use excess food to 'handle' these emotions.

If you cannot recognise your emotions, much less will you be able to ‘control’ them. If your emotions are causing you to overeat and your way of eating or relating to food is becoming uncontrolled, you could be allowing your emotions to control you. In this case, any diet you follow will have no effect to help you lose weight, because you will be focusing on the wrong target; i.e., on calculating calories, instead of analysing some of the reasons why you are gaining weight.

Many times, when you are an emotional eater, what you try to do when you follow a diet is to cure the symptoms, rather than the real cause, or an opportunity to get to know yourself more deeply. That is, to know what is the true relationship that you have with food. You could be stuck thinking that what you're eating is what is making you gain weight and to a certain extent this true. Calories count, but you are better off not counting them.

The invitation here is to be able to make an internal paradigm shift. Talking about food and emotions, becomes the possibility to look inside yourself, and explore your feelings, what makes you feel emotional and observe the reactions you have to these, especially in relation to food. It is an exercise that takes introspection and takes time. It is betting on learning to recognize how you feel and what situations trigger certain reactions in you.

When I immediately realise that I have been eating too much and I am gaining weight, automatically putting myself on a diet can become a purpose. The purpose of not touching, not observing how I feel and how I relate to food when I have certain emotions. Dieting, eating or exercising compulsively, speaking ill of our body, become a way of life that we can become addicted to, to avoid feeling 'what we feel'.

If you observe that this is your case, start by exploring your chances of losing weight, through knowing what your attitudes or relationships with food are, recognizing how you feel. Do an exercise to explore how, when, why and how often you eat. Keep a food diary, not to weigh and measure what you eat (although it is also important), but above all to explore what you eat under the influence of different emotions and observe and write down how you feel when you eat them. Most importantly, find someone who can help you with this, because it is not a path that can be travelled alone. You need that objective mirror, that person who can help you travel this path of self-awareness.

In order to lose weight and improve my health, I need to recognize my emotions and the relationships I have with food.