All your life experiences and attachment to foods are deeply intertwined, weaved in your thoughts, your conscious and unconscious self.

Particular relationships and attachments to foods are very unique to every person, however, some common examples can give you a hint as to how the attachment to foods occur.

Attachment, association and relationships of emotions to food start very early in our childhoods.

For example, people around us, our parents, relatives, friends, etc. use foods as a reward when we are childs, we like candy, chocolate or cookies and they are offered to us as a reward for behaviors.

Other examples of associations to food can be the tinking bell of the ice cream truck, a traditional food gathering at a holiday with family, the smell of fresh cookies at home when mom used to bake them, in these cases the association is one of love and the going for those foods help us now soothe us and connect us with that love again, in some families food is the only currency of love at times.

Also, if as a child you were for example ashamed or ridiculed by others you could have started back then to turn to food for solace.

Adverse childhood associations to food can manifest as serious eating disorders later in life.

As we move to adolescence, specially for women, the association with eating can be a painful experience, you start receiving tremendous pressure from society to stay thin, different values are assigned to you if you don't fit the 'ideal' body shape, some of us spend tremendous amounts of energy and effort to stay trim and some of us simply take all the abuse and humiliation.

These experiences can translate to unhealthy relationship and association with foods.

As pressures, responsibilities and bad experiences in our lifes start accumulating we start trying to cope with stress in many different ways, stress produces different amounts of cortisol and adrenaline on our bodies that also contribute to distortions in our body, so many of us start using food as a tool to cope with our lives.

Find the signs of emotional eating, find if you are an emotional eater and take steps to reverse the trend, all these behaviors were learned, which means that you can 'unlearn them', you can reverse them, none of these habits are outside of your control.