How Can Overeating Mask Depression?

I would say one of the big national epidemic we face is not only obesity, but the fact that lots of people use food for something it's not designed to do. Which is to handle emotions. People try to use food to mask their emotions, to numb their emotions and to distract them from their emotions, and so when a person is feeling sad, it's not unusual that they were turned to food as a placed to sort of numb those feelings.

So when you're feeling very sad and you find comfort, for example in cake or junk food or salty food. You may end up just eating more and more of it just to make the feeling go away or it at least distract you from that feeling for a little while because nobody wants to feel bad.

Now sadly what can often happen is when you make this choices to eat food, too much of it or bad food to distract from a mood, not only will it only work for a short while, that bad mood or that sad mood may return and you're often likely to feel worse because because now you sit filled yourself up with unhealthy choices.

So that relationship between over eating and managing moods is a really unhealthy one, and yet so many of us do it all the time.