From the time we are born, we have an emotional relationship with food. As a baby, you were driven by a need for sustenance, based on your innate survival instincts. When you cried, your parents often soothed you with the breast or bottle. At the same time, they cooed and cuddled and stroked your cheek, so the unconscious connection was formed: as well as satisfying hunger, food nurtured you at a much deeper level.

Throughout childhood, the use of food to placate and calm continued. Remember when you fell off your bike, skinned your knee or were teased by the kid next door? While you were still tearfully babbling explanations, your mum or dad would appear with the biscuits and milk and within nanoseconds your eyes were dry and you felt happily diverted but also consoled, compensated and cared for.

Unintentionally, your parents were giving you an incredibly powerful message: food can comfort emotional and physical pain. Little wonder then that as adults we often use food to pamper ourselves after a frantic or tense day — it’s the main strategy we have been taught to employ when dealing with the stressors of life.

The idea of food as a reward is reinforced all through our formative years via our cultural thinking (lollies for filling up your sticker chart at school), practices (a birthday cake for turning one year older) and the way we elevate certain foods above others (the word “treat” to refer to unhealthy snacks).

The use of food as a reward is also evident at many family dinner tables – what child can’t remember being bribed to eat their Brussels sprouts with the promise of icecream at the end of the meal? The trouble is, once you become an adult you don’t suddenly lose this learnt association with food and pampering and it can confuse your understanding of the role food should play in your life. Not only do you hanker for dessert after your evening meal because it was the bribe you were offered as a child, but you may feel you deserve the sweet indulgence because you ate a healthy dinner.

Emotional eating

As an adult, using food to boost your mood can turn you into an emotional eater who gains weight when going through a rough patch. Or you may find your approach to food is generally balanced until you have a difficult day, when you morph into a binge-eater, downing a family-sized chocolate bar in one sitting. What is going on in here is complex and multi-faceted.

First, through satisfying your cravings, you are trying to soothe your emotional state. Second, through comfort food you are trying to recreate that childhood sense of being nurtured and protected. Your choices of comfort food may not be confined to cinnamon teacake just like Mum made; you may also crave felafel rolls (because they remind you of carefree days with your friends at uni) or toasted cheese sandwiches (because you and your first lover enjoyed those while lazing at home on snuggly weekends).