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OVEREATING

SELF KNOWLEDGE 

It is clear that many of us eat too much. In response, a huge industry has grown up that advises us to consume more quinoa, pomegranate and fennel salad and, as often as we can, kale and apple soup. But this is to misunderstand why we start eating excessive amounts. It has nothing to do with food, and therefore trying to change our diet isn’t the most logical place to focus our efforts. We eat too much because what we’re really hungry for isn’t available. When reaching for a tube of potato chips or biting into yet another burrito, the problem isn’t our unconstrained appetite; rather, it is the difficulty we have in getting access to the emotional and psychological nutrients that would feed our broken souls – nutrients that include understanding, tenderness, forgiveness, reconciliation and closeness. We eat too much not because we are (as we brutally accuse ourselves) greedy, but because we live in a world where the emotional ingredients we crave are so elusive. A vast quantity of human ingenuity has been devoted to enticing the palate, and we have succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. But in the emotional arena, we have hardly begun to supply ourselves reliably with what we long to consume. If we could have ready access to sympathetic friendliness, warmer and calmer relationships with those we love, clearer knowledge of our true ambitions and better self-knowledge around our own failings, our waistlines would be under a lot less pressure. We continue to eat, not because we are hungry, but because we cannot find anything more satisfying to absorb.


This article is from The School Of Life 

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