I’ve been doing some work recently with people who are trying to separate their emotions from food. 

This is hard for many of us. From our earliest times, we associate eating with feelings. I seem to remember when I was upset as a child, I was given a sweet biscuit. That’s the sort of routine  that sets up a lifelong belief that sugary items are comforting. 

So, we definitely link comfort with food. But that’s not all. We often eat in response to other emotions, such as loneliness, tiredness, when we feel we deserve a reward and even – for some individuals at least – when we’re angry. 

I once had a client I’ll call Sandra who had an extremely tough life which was made even more difficult by her demanding and argumentative mother.  Whenever they crossed swords, Sandra went home and tucked into most of a crusty loaf of bread slathered with thick layers of butter.  

I sympathised with her. The mother was a nightmare. But using food in a bid to calm herself was making Sandra even more unhappy. She was always on a diet because she was several stones overweight, and her frequent bingeing was sabotaging her health goals.  

Sandra’s not alone. Masses of us resort to food when emotions run high. Maybe you do. But if you do, does it ever really rid you of your difficulties? I doubt it. 

Sandra did solve her problem in the end. She managed, with help, to find other methods of dealing with anger.

She found that going to the gym was good for offloading fury as well as helpful in achieving fitness and weight loss. She also bought a huge cushion which she used to thump repeatedly when she was cross. And she learned useful assertiveness skills so she could talk back calmly, sensibly and effectively to her impossible mother. 

This took a while, but she stuck at it. And gradually she came to see that using food to deal with emotions didn’t work, but that other strategies did. 

Geoff is someone I met when I gave a talk at a gentleman’s club in the Midlands. He had lost his wife six months previously and was finding it hard to cope and felt painfully alone.

He confided in me that he got through the evenings by tucking into bags of crisps and at least one bottle of wine. Unfortunately, this self-medication did not resolve his sadness and isolation. And on top of that, he had transformed from quite a slim man to a chubby one and woke most days with a hangover. 

We had various email conversations about what might help, and I’m pleased to tell you that he started talking more openly to his daughter about how much he missed her mother. He also sought out some bereavement counselling and made a plan to get out more to visit friends or join quiz evenings and so on. He still likes a drink but no longer seeks a remedy for loneliness at the bottom of a bottle.   

Many of us use food as a reward, which seems reasonable, but that rather depends on the food! Few of us, I know, start a tiresome task like a tax return with the promise that afterwards we’ll indulge ourselves with a few crunchy carrot sticks. Instead, we seek out cake, a large G&T or our favourite chocolates.  

I don’t want to be a killjoy. Of course we’re entitled to rewards, comfort and so on. But bearing in mind that 64 per cent of the UK population are overweight or obese, it makes sense to find other ways of caring for ourselves that don’t inevitably involve eating or drinking. 

I was reminded rather forcibly about this topic when I read a survey last week on the the calorific content of takeaways. 

Now, I know lots of families treat themselves to a takeaway on a Friday night to kickstart the weekend and enjoy each other’s company. And plenty of us order a takeaway if we have children and grandchildren coming.  

But did you know that the recommended limit of calories a day for men is 2,500 and 2,000 for women? And that, if we don’t want to put on weight, we’re urged to aim for no more than 600 calories per meal?

Did you also know that a portion of traditional fish and chips tends to contain almost 1,500 calories?  And that a pizza and chips can be more than 3,000? That’s more in one meal than any of us should consume during an entire day. 

I learned this from Nesta, who are a British foundation and charity formed to support innovation, and to design and test solutions to society’s biggest problems. 

It really got me thinking. 

We all enjoy happy family gatherings but maybe we should use takeaways more sparingly when we organise them. 

Food is one of life’s more reliable pleasures. But let’s not assume it’s the only answer to soothing, indulging or improving our moods. There are other ways.