If Food Calls Your Name, You Don't Have to Answer.

I'm reading a great book by Debbie Danowski called The Emotional Eater's Book of Inspiration. I highly recommend this book if you struggle with using food to manage your feelings and cope with your emotions. This book provides 90 funny and poignant truths about overcoming food addition.

Many of us are unaware of the ways we use food to soothe our feelings. Some people eat when they're happy, sad, frustrated, bored, lonely, or tired or all of the above. According to Danowski, when we don't want to experience our feelings, we turn to food to help us feel better. Somehow the notion of hunger gets lost in a sea of emotions and we forget why we're eating in the first place. We then become disconnected with our bodies and what true hunger feels like. Using food to cope creates a new host of problems and doesn't address the original issue.

So if the ice cream in the freezer is calling to you and saying "come and get me," Danowski offers the following thoughts in her book:

"Despite what we may think, food cannot speak to us. It does not breathe. It is not living and we cannot hurt its feelings if we don't eat it....By giving human characteristics to food we create a relationship with an object. Once we create this relationship we become emotionally attached to it. This allows us to manufacture situations that make it nearly impossible for us to resist overeating. In a sense, we are using food to replace the human relationship that involve the person who once served them to us."

If food is calling your name and you're not sure if you are physically hungry, take a few minutes and distract yourself by going for a walk, calling a friend, or doing an errand. Then if you're stomach is grumbling, go ahead and eat. If not, just remind yourself that "food doesn't speak and that even if it did, you don't have to listen. You can choose to walk away instead."

You have the power.