Buffering
To buffer means to lessen or moderate the impact of something.
Examples of buffering include food, shopping and spending money, drinking and drugs, social media, and Netflix binging.
All of these things have a negative side effect, some greater than others.
When we talk about buffering from a weight loss standpoint, buffering would be defined as using food to lessen the impact of your emotions or feelings.
It’s using food for anything other than to fuel your body.
You could also call buffering stress eating or emotional eating.
Reasons you might buffer would be to entertain yourself when you’re bored, to keep you company when you’re lonely, to keep you sane when you’re stressed, or to make you feel better when you’re sad or feeling guilty for yelling at your kids.
Any time you use food to help you momentarily escape doing the dishes, discipline your children, or deal with quarreling, you are buffering.
We also buffer to get immediate pleasure.
This is how we often cope.
Our problem is that we’ve never been taught how to be emotionally mature.
We spend our lives stressing, eating, and obsessing instead of just feeling our feelings.
We run from them, and push them away, mostly with food.
This can also include healthy food.
When you buffer, you’re answering some kind of a problem or an emotion with a substitute and not the actual thing that you need.
What you’re really wanting is to feel better about yourself and your life.
Brooke Castillo brilliantly teaches, “When you deny feeling an emotion, you deny yourself the opportunity to learn why you are feeling the feeling in the first place and with that you miss the opportunity to change the cause of it.”
Be willing to solve what’s really going on in your life. What is the real problem that is making you turn to food?
We don’t like to feel uncomfortable.
Food has become a yummy temporary escape.
It’s a Band-Aid that covers up the problem, and until you deal with the root of the problem, it will never truly go away.
Not to mention, you also add on the problem of being unhealthy and overweight on top of everything else.
