Fat emotions

The link between emotions and food has always been perplexing.

Story: Sima Cohen

You’ve finally decided to go on a health kick. You cut out pastries, you work out regularly, drink more water, follow trainer Kayla Itsines on Instagram, and so on. You’re doing all the right things but something’s wrong. The number on the scale doesn’t budge.

You think you’ve covered everything, but there’s one very important aspect missing: cutting out the fat emotions. Let’s take a deeper look at what they are:

Fat emotions are produced by the inaccessible part of your brain’s control system that rules your physical life by the unpredictability of your ever-changing mood. For example, when you’re stressed, you might eat more chips than you intend; when you’re sad, you might reach for that fourth glass of wine; when you feel helpless, you might eat bigger portions. In the moment, these things feel necessary. That extra chip or the fourth glass of wine seem like the perfect solution to your fat emotions. However, they never are the solutions to the underlying problems.

The most neglected step in most health journeys is taking care of your mental and emotional state. The anger, the blame, the feeling of not being good enough, and being unforgiving build an atmosphere of negativity in your process. When you surround yourself with this attitude, everything suddenly is someone else’s fault. At the end of the day, you’re the one eating chips and drinking wine. It’s your own unresolved mental and emotional hunger leading you down the rabbit hole of bad habits.

I used to have an unhealthy relationship with food. It was hard for me to accept that food wasn’t my biggest problem. The problem was my ability to control my image. I don’t mean what I saw in the mirror, because that came after. I took control of how I saw myself. I took control of my perspective of myself so I could take control of how I saw my problems thereafter. When I took the effort to resolve the emotions that blocked me from taking the next step in health, I realized how easy it was to not only lose the weight or get in shape, but to also feel good about it.

ABOUT THE WRITER → Sima Cohen is a health and wellness expert and author of “Sima’s Healthy Indulgence,” which condenses 20 years of fruitful practice into one book. See simacohenblog.com for more.