Emotional Eating 101
From this post, you’ll learn all the basics you need to know about emotional eating:
- Why do people eat their emotions
- Whether or not everyone eats emotionally
- When does emotional eating become a problem
- What to do if you find yourself emotionally eating
“When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment, I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.”
-Oscar Wilde.
Who hasn’t seen the obligatory scene in a movie, where the couple has broken up and we find the female protagonist home with a tub of her favorite ice cream. Or you and your family have gone to a celebration banquet to mark some life-changing event. Maybe it was a wedding or a graduation. Emotional eating is such a part of the human condition that it can be seen almost anywhere you look.
Why do people eat their emotions?
The human brain has developed to reward itself for doing things that aid in our survival. Our brains are developed to keep us alive, avoid pain, and seek pleasure. That’s why sex feels so good and why a delicious meal leaves you feeling satisfied. In the first instance, you have completed your ultimate evolutionary goal, to procreate. In the second you are rewarded for procuring vital nutrients to make it through another day.
Does everyone emotionally eat?
Emotional eating has its roots in an evolutionary trick to keep you alive. And in fact, it happens to some extent to everyone. A paper in the International Journal of Eating Disorders titled Emotional eating and eating psychopathology among non‐eating‐disordered women drew this same conclusion.
During their study, they took 51 women with no current or past eating disorders. Each completed the Emotional Eating Scale (EES) and the Eating Disorders Inventory (EDI). Although the scores for this population were lower than among binge eaters, they were similar to those found among other clinical groups with eating disorders.
When does emotional eating become a problem?
Emotional eating can become a problem when it becomes your sole coping mechanism. Other things to look out for include:
- The inability to tell the difference between emotional hunger and genuine hunger. That is eating to make yourself feel emotionally satisfied, or suppress your feelings, or distract yourself from your real problems with eating.
- Withdrawal from your support network, your family, and friends.
- Mindless eating. You’ve eaten an entire bag of chips or an entire pint of ice cream without really enjoying it.
- Feelings of regret, guilt, or shame arise after you have eaten.
What can you do if you find yourself emotionally eating?
Learn your triggers
The adage, you can’t fix if you don’t know what’s broken, really applies here. Try keeping a food journal. Keep a food journal that records not only what you ate but also how hungry you were and what emotions you felt before and after eating, how much you slept, how stressed you felt, how much you exercised, and if you had any relationship issues that day. You can download a free Food and Lifestyle Journal that I designed specifically to find your triggers for emotional or habitual overeating by tracking the above-mentioned parameters.
Recognizing a pattern allows you to develop a strategy to break it. For instance, if you often eat because you think you deserve it after a tough day, keep in mind you also deserve to feel healthy and be proud of yourself. If you eat because of stress, learn to dial back that stress. Yoga, meditation, and regular exercise can help reduce stress levels. If you tend to suppress your uncomfortable feelings, learn to deal with your emotions without food by building emotional tolerance.
Change your physical state
The best distractions from emotional eating are things that take only about five minutes — just long enough to help you switch gears and turn on your conscious mind instead of your primal brain.
Maybe you want to leave the table, go to another room, do a few jumping jacks or take a few deep breaths. Moving your body can quickly change your mental state and snap you out of a funk. Slow, deep breathing can calm your nervous system so you can think clearly and recognize irrational thoughts urging you to eat.
You can also set a timer for 5 -10 minutes. You’ll not eat during this time, instead, you’ll go through the next steps. But don’t worry, you can eat after this time period if you still want to, that’s completely fine.
Question your thoughts
Our thoughts create our feelings, and our feelings drive our actions. Therefore, if you want to change your actions, i.e. if you want to stop overeating for emotional reasons, you need to be aware of your thoughts driving you to eat.
Pay attention to the thoughts when you start to have the urge to eat when you are not hungry. Are these thoughts rational? Are they true? Are you sure they are true? What if they were not true? How did these thoughts make you feel in the past? Is this a thought worth keeping and listening to? How would you like to feel instead? What thoughts would make you feel that way? Can you change your negative thoughts to more helpful thoughts?
Feel your feelings
Instead of suppressing and stuffing down your feelings with food or distracting yourself with eating when you don’t want to feel an uncomfortable emotion, learn to cope with your feelings without food.
Neurologists found that emotions last only 90 seconds. The chemicals causing you to feel a certain emotion are flushed out of the system in 90 seconds. If you still feel the emotion after this time, it´s because you choose to dwell on that emotion. If you let the feelings just wash over you without acting on them, they will disappear after a few minutes. No matter how awful that emotion is, it can’t hurt you. You can just sit with it and watch it disappear after a while.
If you still feel that emotion, you need to look at your thoughts keeping that emotion “alive”. You need to pay attention to your usual thought patterns driving you to emotionally eat (see previous steps).
Don’t fight your feelings and thoughts
Don’t fight your feelings and thoughts, you’ll just make them stronger. If you try to use willpower to not eat when you have the urge to eat emotionally, it’s like trying to do yoga in a raging river. You won´t be able to do it. The river will take you off your legs and will carry you away. But if you get out of the river, you can do yoga on the shore easily while watching the raging river from a safe place.
As we can´t control the river, we also can´t control our emotions and thoughts, but we don´t need to. If you just wait, you will see your old thoughts washed away and replaced by new thoughts and your experience will change.
Temporarily take away the temptations
Until you learn to deal with your emotions without food it can help if keep your house clear of comfort foods and junk food, or keep them somewhere separate from other family members. And when you feel the urge to eat your emotions, postpone your trip to the grocery store until you have your emotions and thoughts in check.
Get support
It’s much more difficult to stop emotional eating when you don’t have a solid support system. Friends, family, and a coach can all help keep you on track. If you want to talk with me about your specific issue with emotional eating, feel free to book a free call here.
This blog post was only the tip of the iceberg. In my workbook, How to stop eating your feelings, you can learn so much more about how to stop emotional and binge eating. It´s about 200 pages full of exercises to help you break free from this frustrating and debilitating habit and get your food freedom back. You can also read a free chapter and get 3 free training videos before you decide to buy it.
This free training shows you the exact steps to break free from emotional and binge eating.
Final thoughts
So this was all the basics you need to know about emotional eating.
In summary: emotional eating is a part of life and our culture. For most people, it is fairly innocuous, but if it becomes your sole coping mechanism, this can cause major problems. If it does, try a few of the things I recommended, and if you need further support reach out to me.
You can send me an email at hello@ritamayblog.com.
You can book a free call here.
We can have a 90-minute 1 on 1 consultation to help you find your triggers and develop a strategy to break free from emotional and binge eating.
Look forward to speaking with you,
xo, Rita May
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