Food, booze & your emotions: how to change negative eating & drinking habits

We had a fascinating chat with this week’s podcast guest The Kitchen Shrink, Dr Andrea Oskis, to find out what & how we eat affects our emotions & relationships. Plus, life after dry January...

Feb 13, 2025

Read more about Dr Andrea Oskis in The Times, photo by Lauren Fleishmans

We’ve all heard of comfort eating, right? But did you know that as well as your emotions, energy and waistline, food can also influence your personal attachment style with family, friends, colleagues and lovers too? Neither did we, which is why we were intrigued when a preview of Dr Andrea Oskis’s new book The Kitchen Shrink: What our Food Reveals About Our Relationships landed on our desks - we decided we had to get her onto our Postcards From Midlife Podcast. Andrea, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist is also a professionally trained cook, food writer, lecturer and runs courses for the NHS on the psychology of attachment styles. She explained how our food stories from childhood onwards can bring a unique approach to resolving our emotional dilemmas and even to heal relationship trauma. She also told us about the work she does with her clients, how we can better understand our own relationship with food, as well as what we can learn about the people in our lives through their food and eating habits.

And for our midweek quickie podcast, we turned our thoughts to alcohol. Over the past years, like many women in midlife, we’ve both cut back on the vino as our Generation X levels of drinking become a real physical and emotional health hazard in the midlife, menopausal years. However we still enjoy the social and relaxation aspects of a tipple or two, so after getting through dry January we wanted to find out how to get the balance right. We talked to sommelier Kelly J Stevenson who had lots of great tips for low and no alcohol wines. And we glugged back a glass of Clean & Co’s alcohol free whiskey, which was delicious at 10am in the morning! Tasted like an Old Fashioned - we loved it!

Hope you can tune in to the episodes and do post your Damp February stories in the comments below.