Almost every day there is a news story about obesity.What isn’t addressed is the emotional need driving it all. Carbohydrate abuse equals emotional abuse because of how most Americans are not aware of what their bodies are telling them. I really appreciate some of the thoughts put forth by Deepak Chopra in an article over at the Huffington Post.

He makes some suggestions that points to the emotional abuse behind the problem and ways to handle it.

Carbohydrate Abuse Equals Emotional Abuse

Your goal should be to bring your mind back in control of your diet. This step is more important than any fad or crusade. Forget food groups and remember yourself. You are here to satisfy your desire for a better life, and that means reaching in a state of well-being. As with protein and fat, carbohydrates fall in line with well-being if you ask a few basic questions:

• How much junk food am I eating for junk satisfaction?
• What does it take to stop taste addiction?
• Which foods make me feel good for the rest of my day?
• What’s the best way to meet my emotional needs?

The glut of sugar we consume is tied to how you answer these questions, because sugar can be abused so easily that it leads to junk satisfaction (a brief sugar high), taste addiction (craving sugary foods even when you are not hungry), broken connection to bodily signals (not knowing when your stomach is empty or full), and reaching for emotional surrogates (eating in order not to feel bad). None of this abuse is part of sugar itself. None of it relates to what your body actually needs as fuel. The best nutrition advice in the world is pointless until your relationship to food has been straightened out.

That’s a major process that reaches far beyond three meals a day. Carbs are only a sliver of the solutions, but since they play a big role in the problem, let’s arm ourselves with some basic knowledge.

To your body, carbohydrates are the most readily-digested fuel. They are converted into energy, which everyone needs not only for physical activity but for basic metabolic functions. Every cell needs fats and proteins as well, but carbs provide quick, easily-accessible fuel. Once metabolized by enzymes in the digestive system, most carbohydrates break down into simple sugars, which permeate the intestinal wall and then course through the bloodstream to deliver a caloric payload to your cells.

There are three main categories of carbohydrates:

• Simple sugars (simple carbohydrates), such as those responsible for the sweetness in fruit (fructose) and table sugar (sucrose).
• Starch, the most common complex carbohydrate in our diet.
• Fiber, another complex carbohydrate. Fiber can’t be broken down and passes through the system essentially undigested.

Yet every road leads back to holistic well-being. You can eat too much and harm your body. You can eat the wrong foods for what your cells actually need. You can eat all the “right” foods but neglect to exercise, and exercise fanatics can forget to be relaxed and content simply with being. As nutrition becomes more scientific, it becomes more reductionist. Remember that no one ever became healthy by memorizing calorie charts and the government’s RDA of vitamins.

Click here to read more about carbohydrate abuse

So all this information boils down to us getting to the point of being able to communicate with our bodies outside of the programming we have received from society so we are eating for our bodies and not for our minds based on our emotions.

I really enjoyed Dr. Chopra’s conclusion that points to balance. So if carbohydrate abuse equals emotional abuse in your life or you think it might effect your friends share this with them and like this on Facebook and tweet it too.

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