Emotional eating is when people use food as a way to deal with feelings instead of satisfying hunger. Believe it or not, we’ve all been there. Have you ever finished a whole bag of chips out of boredom or downed cookie after cookie while preparing for a big test? But when done a lot — especially without realizing it — emotional eating can affect weight, health and overall well-being.

Not many of us make the connection between eating and our feelings. Understanding what drives emotional eating can help people take steps to change it. One of the biggest myths about emotional eating is that ifs caused by negative feelings. Yes, people often turn to food when they’re stressed out, lonely, sad, anxious or bored. But emotional eating can be linked to positive feelings too, like the romance of sharing dessert on Valentine’s Day or the celebration of a holiday feast. Sometimes, emotional eating is tied to major life events, like a death or a divorce. More often, though, it’s the countless little daily stresses that cause someone to seek comfort in food.

Emotional eating patterns can be learned. A child who is given candy after a big achievement may grow up using candy as a reward for a job well done. If a crying boy gets some cookies, he may link cookies with comfort. It’s not easy to “unlearn” patterns of emotional eating. But it is possible. And it starts with an awareness of what’s going on.

We’re all emotional eaters to a degree. But for some people, emotional eating can be a real problem, causing serious weight gain or other problems. The trouble with emotional eating is that once the pleasure of eating is gone, the feelings that cause it remain. And you often may feel worse about eating the amount or type of food you like. That’s why it helps to know the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger. Next time you reach for a snack, wait and think about which type of hunger is driving it.

Keep healthy

Your co-worker brings in brownies, your daughter makes cookies for a holiday party and candy is arriving from far-flung relatives. Sugar appears on almost all joyful occasions. It is celebration, festivity and family love. It’s also dangerous. Sugar, perhaps more than salt, contributes to the development of cardiovascular disease. Evidence is growing that eating an undue amount of sugar can lead to fatty liver disease, hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, obesity and kidney disease.

Yet people can’t resist it. And the reason for that is pretty simple. People just can’t resist it. And we don’t mean disability to resist it in the way that people talk about delicious foods. We mean the weakness, literally, in a similar way of drugs due to the fact that the sugar manufacturers are doing everything they can to keep us hooked.

Just a few hundred years ago, concentrated sugars were essentially absent from the human diet. Sugar was a rare source of energy in the environment, and strong longings for it benefited humans for living on. Sugar longings initiated searches for sweet foods, the kinds that help us layer on fat for times of scarcity.

Today concentrated sugar is everywhere, used in approximately 75 percent of packaged foods purchased in the United States. The average American consumes anywhere from a quarter to a half pound of sugar a day. If you consider that the concentrated sugar in a single can of soda might be more than what most people would have consumed in an entire year just a few hundred years ago, you get a sense of how dramatically our environment has changed. The sweet longing that once offered an advantage now works against us.

A better approach to sugar rehab (康复) is to promote the consumption of whole, natural foods. Substituting whole foods for sweet industrial synthetic foods may be a hard sell, but in the face of an industry that is exploiting our biological nature to keep us addicted, it may be the best solution for those who need that sugar fix.