Socially Conditioned Eating
In order to begin to understand emotional eating, we must discuss social conditioning, which was once a very little-known term but is becoming more widely used among today’s conscious youth.
Social conditioning refers to the norms that we have inherited practically from birth; they are so much a part of the fabric of our culture that it can feel strange to question them. But here’s what we need to understand: these norms are intimately connected with the act of emotional eating.
Social conditioning at large has compromised our sanity, but socially conditioned eating specifically has given rise to all of our eating disorders—from relatively mild expressions to full-blown cases. If it were not for social conditioning, we would not have eating disorders.
Only civilized people have eating disorders. But why is this so?
In the answer to this question lies the solution for emotional eating.
Pondering this question in light of all my personal and professional experience, logic, and intuition has led me to the conclusion that our stresses, anxieties, regrets, primal childhood experiences, repressed emotions, and blocked creativity are all symptoms of our social wiring. Our way of life constricts us, limits us, and emotionally poisons us.
With all due respect to our society’s merits, among them are some devastating drawbacks. I remain hopeful that we may become innovative enough to take the best of civilization and leave behind the rest—that which does not serve our evolving well.
In the meantime, though, the social blueprint that we are asked to accept renders us physically and emotionally handicapped.
– From Emotional Eating SOS by Natalia Rose
