Controlling The Chemistry of Emotional Eating

by Maria Khalifé

There was a time in our civilization when eating was done only for survival. In our times, eating is so plentiful that it’s led to eating inappropriately, called emotional eating because we are angry, bored, stressed, frustrated, down in the dumps, watching TV, too busy, and not busy enough, getting together with friends. It’s no longer about survival; it’s about emotion these days which involves brain chemistry. Brain chemicals influence your emotions but your reason for eating as well, for example:

Norepinephrine: This is the fight-or-flight chemical.

Serotonin: This neurotransmitter makes you feel good and is targeted by antidepressants.

Dopamine: This is the built in pleasure and reward system. It’s keenly sensitive to addictions; because it helps you feel no pain.

 GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid): This amino acid anesthetizes you so that excess weight can disappear responsibly.

 Nitric oxide: This neuropeptide helps calm you. It relaxes the blood vessels of the body.

Balancing these chemicals requires a balanced diet. But if you have a diet in which sugar predominates, for example, you’ve got a good chance for becoming addicted to serotonin.

If you become more aware of your emotions, and you work to eat a more-balanced choice from all of the food groups, your hormone level will stabilize and your desire to eat the wrong foods will automatically return to normal.

Here are some tips to help you achieve normalcy:

1. Use foods to your advantage. Foods have different effects on your mind and your digestive system. Try turkey to cut carb cravings. Turkey contains tryptophan, which increases serotonin to improve your mood and combat depression and helps you resist cravings for simple carbs. Try salmon for moods. Omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in certain fish (including salmon, canned tuna, halibut, and mahi-mahi), have long been known as brain boosters and cholesterol clearers, but they’ve also convincingly been shown to help with depression in pregnant women. Depression contributes to hedonistic and emotional eating.

2. Savor the flavor. If you’re going to eat something that’s bad for you, really get into enjoying it. Take a piece of dark (70% cocoa) chocolate, for example, to relieve stress and to reward yourself with something sweet. It’s OK to eat what you think of as “bad food” occasionally.

3. Get enough sleep. This can really help control appetite. If your body doesn’t get the seven to eight hours of sleep it requires each night, it has to find ways to compensate for neurons not secreting the normal amounts of serotonin or dopamine. And it does that by craving sugary foods that will give you an immediate release of serotonin and dopamine.

Use these tips to get your emotional eating under control and you’ll be on your way to a more balanced way of life.

Controlling Personalities

By Maria Khalifé

There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. ~ Wm. Shakespeare

When you understand that life is one of the most luscious learning experiences, that all you experience comes from how you think, that you can improve the level of what you think about and improve this experience, at this point you become relaxed, in a harmonious state, peaceful about your life and happy with everything because of your conscious recognition about what is really happening. This is something controlling personalities need to learn.

Without this understanding, you live a life with much fear, hard work, and the struggle to gain security, harmony, and well-being through living in the box of control. You will work hard to maintain this control. You will exercise this control over the money you earn, the relationships in your life, the status you find acceptable, or, you may find this understanding through your inner world using mental practice and discipline.

Some people are control freaks, and rigidly control “things external” to themselves because they don’t understand their thought governs all they experience. Control freaks might appear wealthy and healthy and happy, but I know they live in constant fear of losing control.

Real understanders (described in the first paragraph) isn’t obsessed with control because they know that through persistence, they’ll get whatever they think about to the point of the absolute conviction they already have it. They exercise “control” over themselves and they have no fear of losing control.

Controlling personalities expend tremendous time, energy and peace of mind striving hard to stay invested in keeping control over all their stuff – to keep all those plates spinning and not crashing to the ground because they think their peace, freedom and success stem from these controllable things.

There is a new world of possibility outside this box of control, if we could train ourselves to see it. Krishnamurti wrote about the box of control:

Let us for a moment, imaginatively at least, look over the world from a point of view which will reveal the inner workings and the outer workings of man, his creations and his battles; and if you can do that imaginatively for a moment, what do you see spread before you?

You see man imprisoned by innumerable walls, walls of religion, of social, political and national limitations, walls created by his own ambitions, aspirations, fears, hopes, security, prejudices, hate and love. Within these barriers and prisons he is held, limited by the colored maps of national boundaries, racial antagonisms, class struggles and cultural group distinctions. You see man throughout the world imprisoned, enclosed by the limitations, the walls of his own creation. Through these walls and through these enclosures he is trying to express what he feels and what he thinks, and within these he functions with joy and with sorrow.

So you see man throughout the world as a prisoner, imprisoned within the walls of his own creation, within the walls of his own making; and through these enclosures, through these walls of environment, through the limitation of his ideas, ambitions and aspirations – through these he is trying to function, sometimes successfully, and sometimes with hideous struggle.

And the man who succeeds in making himself comfortable in the prison we call successful, whereas the man who succumbs in the prison we call a failure. But both success and failure are within the walls of the prison.

To someone thinking inside of the control box, actual freedom looks a lot like being out of control and it scares them. When you begin to explore the freedom of the understander instead of this being-in-control stance, you learn to adhere to life’s rules and the fear dissolves.

Letting go of our old way is frightening. Richard Bach wrote about letting go in his wonderful book “Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah.” Just read Chapter One here, and you’ll see what I mean.

My wish for you is that you become an understander; that you discover life’s laws so that you can escape what other controlling personalities cannot, and enter into greater health, wealth, success and harmony. Christmas is a time that exemplifies this bettered condition, and one of the Great Teachers around whom Christmas is celebrated has left us plenty of proverbs, parables and examples of how to enjoy life as it was intended.

Hidden Factors in NOT Reaching Goals

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.
~ G. K. Chesterton

Do you know what the core skills are for successful goal creation?  Here are some clues:

• Identifying what you want
• Create action steps for creating it
• Analyze the results you get
• Make a renewed plan based on your results

So if you were doing all that, why might you still not reaching goals on schedule? One of the main reasons folks are not reaching goals is very simple: They don’t realize how long it takes!

Persistence (or perseverance) is one of the key elements in goal achievement. And, luckily for us, we were born with the capability to persevere (or persist,) so I’m hoping that since you now know this, you will strongly consider how long it might take for you to achieve your goals this year.

Will you have to change strategies, adjust time frames, turn in a different direction, or even change jobs to achieve your goals? Yes, of course! All of those are possibilities, but because you are one heck of a persistent person, you take all those in stride.

Here are some ways to help you to persevere for all the time it may take you to achieve your goals:

1. Ease up on yourself! 

Now that you know it’s going to more than likely take more time than you thought, why not give yourself so much time that you’ll surprise yourself and get it finished ahead of time?

Your goals aren’t the be-all, end-all, do-all. They’re just a target to keep you on the path; to keep you focused on achieving; to be sure you are using all that you are capable of using. Being the fullness of what you presently understand your current self and its level of unfoldment to be is so much easier than slaving away for some arbitrary time line, don’t you think?

2. Double your time frame

We’ve led up to this one: you aren’t giving yourself enough time which creates stress and a sense of failure. So give yourself double the time you think, or heck, triple the time! With a sense of ease, who knows what kind of strategies might come up in your imagination?

3. Focus on Enjoyment

I believe that the quickest way to earn future rewards is to be sure you are enjoying each one of your right-now moments. And if your mind just said “nah nah,” I challenge you to spend one week focused on enjoyment. You might be pleasantly surprised to discover goal achievement while you’re having fun! Instead of focusing on not reaching goals, you’ll be enjoying goal success.