War For Harmony - Who Are You Fighting With?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Overeating is the cause of overweight in about 98% of all cases. The remaining 2% are endocrine diseases, accompanied by the intake of hormonal drugs, and in this case it is necessary to treat the underlying ailment

The need for food is one of the primary biological needs, it is aimed at maintaining life. People eat to get the energy they need, build new cells, and create the complex chemicals needed for life.

Eating behavior is understood as a value attitude towards food and its intake, a stereotype of nutrition in everyday conditions and in a stressful situation, behavior focused on the image of one's own body, and activities to form this image. In other words, eating behavior includes attitudes, behaviors, habits and emotions regarding food that are individual for each person.

While nutrition is certainly a physiological need, psychological motivation also influences eating behavior, both healthy and pathological. For example, the need to eat can be triggered not only by the desire to “feed oneself,” but also by positive (eg, happiness) and negative (eg, anger, depression) emotions. Not the least role is played by internal social attitudes, norms and expectations regarding food consumption. The social significance of food should also be noted. Human nutrition from birth is associated with interpersonal communication. Subsequently, food becomes an integral part of the process of communication, socialization: celebrating various events, establishing and forming business and friendly relationships. Thus, human eating behavior is aimed at satisfying not only biological and physiological, but also psychological and social needs.

The physiological regulator of the amount of food consumed is hunger - a set of unpleasant experiences, consisting in the feeling of emptiness and cramps in the stomach and in the instinctive feeling of the need to eat. The feeling of hunger occurs when the body's nutritional reserves are insufficient for energy balance. So, hunger can be defined as the body's need for nutrients, it is recognized as emptiness in the stomach, lack of energy, weakness. Eating style reflects the emotional needs and state of mind of a person. No other biological function in the early years of life plays as important a role in the emotional state of a person as nutrition. For the first time, the baby experiences relief from bodily discomfort during breastfeeding; thus, satisfying hunger is deeply linked to feelings of comfort and security.

The fear of starvation becomes the basis for the feeling of insecurity (fear of the future), even if we consider that in modern civilization, death from hunger is a rare phenomenon. For a child, a satiety situation means "I am loved"; in fact, the sense of security associated with satiety is based on this identity (oral sensitivity). Thus, the feelings of satiety, security and love in the experiences of the infant are closely related and mixed with each other. The metaphorical and symbolic meaning of food is quite obvious: to maintain life, to feel the taste of the world, letting it in. In the first days and months of a child's life, feeding becomes that "leading activity" in which other mental processes are formed - an attitude towards oneself as an emotional matrix of self-awareness.

In the first year of life, the relationship between mother and child is largely determined by food intake. A nursing mother, by imposing a feeding rhythm on the child against her wishes (the generally accepted not long ago “feeding by the clock”), thereby fosters in the child a distrust of himself and the world around him. In this situation, the infant often swallows hastily without feeling full. This behavior is the infant's response to an “unprotected”, disrupted relationship with the mother, thus forming the basis of our eating disorders, sometimes for life.

The attitude of the mother towards the baby is more important than the method of feeding. This was also pointed out by Z. Freud. If the mother does not show love for the child, and during feeding she is in a hurry or is far from him in her thoughts, the child may become aggressive towards the mother. The child can neither express his aggressive impulses in behavior, nor overcome, he can only displace them. This leads to a dual attitude towards the mother. Conflicting feelings cause different autonomic responses. On the one hand, the body is ready to eat. If the child unconsciously rejects the mother, this leads to a reverse reaction - to spasms, vomiting.

Feeding can encourage and punish; with the mother's milk, the child "absorbs" a system of meanings that mediate the natural process of food intake and turn it into an instrument of external control, and then self-control. Moreover, through their feeding behavior, the baby gains a powerful means of influencing others, since it can cause anxiety, joy, increased attention, and, thus, learns to manipulate the behavior of a significant adult.

At the same time, food for the child supports the unconscious fantasy of unity with the mother; subsequently, the grocery store or refrigerator can become symbolic substitutes for the mother. For many adults, being full means being safe and close to their mother, so gratification of an irresistible urge to eat unconsciously helps to ease fear.

Overweight, obesity are the result of eating disorders, primarily by the type of overeating. Obesity is an increase in body weight due to excess deposition of adipose tissue.

The following important patterns can be identified that exacerbate and perpetuate eating disorders that began to form in infancy:

1. Food - the main source of pleasure - plays a dominant role in family life. Other possibilities of receiving pleasure (spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic) are not developed to the required extent.

2. Any physiological or emotional discomfort of the child is perceived by the mother (or other family members) as hunger. There is a stereotypical feeding of the child, which does not allow him to learn to distinguish physiological sensations from emotional experiences, for example, hunger from anxiety.

3. In families, there is no adequate teaching of effective behavior in times of stress, and therefore the only, incorrect, stereotype is fixed: “when I feel bad, I have to eat”.

4. The relationship between mother and child is broken. The mother has only two main concerns: dressing and feeding the child. A child can attract her attention only with the help of hunger. The process of eating becomes a surrogate substitute for other expressions of love and care. This increases its symbolic significance.

5. In families, there are conflict situations that traumatize the child's psyche, interpersonal relationships are chaotic.

6. The child is not allowed to leave the table until his plate is empty: "Everything on the plate must be eaten."

Thus, the stimulus for the end of a meal is not the feeling of satiety, but the amount of available food. The kid is not taught to notice signs of satiety in time, he gradually gets used to it, eats as long as he sees food, as long as it is on a plate, in a saucepan, in a frying pan, etc. Remember, when we made our first successes in life (for example, reciting a hard-memorized poem with expression), how did adults react to this? Sweet music filled our young souls with their words: “Oh, what a good child! On you for that … "- and then appetizing options followed: a candy, a chocolate bar, a piece of sweet pie, ideally a cake! Very soon, we begin to take this scheme for granted: deserve it - get a treat. So the delicacy becomes for us a kind of confirmation of the positive qualities of our nature and the associated success in life. The formulation of a kind of psychological theorem is firmly rooted in the consciousness: “I eat sweet (tasty), therefore, I am good. Q. E. D".

Overweight people have the following psychological characteristics:

● high anxiety;

● inconsistency with one's ideal and inadequate self-esteem;

● the presence of a feeling of inner emptiness, loss, depression;

● tendency to somatization and excessive concern for the state of their health;

● difficulties in interpersonal relationships, the desire to avoid social contacts and responsibilities;

● psychosthenic symptoms: "lack of strength", psychological discomfort, poor health;

● strong feelings of guilt after episodes of overeating.

A distinctive feature of the psychological defense of such individuals is the predominance of the mechanism of reactive education (hypercompensation). With this version of psychological defense, a person is protected from the realization of unpleasant or unacceptable thoughts, feelings, actions by exaggerating the development of opposite aspirations. There is a kind of transformation of internal impulses into their opposite, understood subjectively. Immature defense mechanisms are also typical for the personality: aggression, projection, as well as regression - an infantile form of response that limits the ability to use alternative forms of behavior.

Thus, having considered the psychological characteristics of a person prone to overeating, we can draw a general conclusion: this is a person who, in a situation of emotional stress, uses overeating as a compensatory source of positive emotions.

The psychology of overweight is a vicious circle: psychological problems - maladjustment - overeating - overweight - decreased quality of life - maladjustment - psychological problems.