Do you eat to feel better or relieve stress?
Emotional eating is the use of food to feel better – to fill emotional needs.
Emotional eating does not solve emotional problems. In fact, it usually makes you feel worse. After that, not only does the original emotional problem remain, but you also feel guilty for overeating, which is often unhealthy.
Before you can break free from the cycle of emotional eating, you first have to learn to distinguish between emotional and physical hunger.
- Emotional hunger comes on suddenly.
- Emotional hunger often leads to remorse or guilt.
- Emotional hunger craves specific comfort foods like fast food or sugary snacks that provide an instant rush.
- Emotional hunger does not fall into the stomach. Instead of a belly rumble or a tingly feeling in your stomach, hunger feels like an urge that you can’t get out of your head. You focus on specific textures, tastes, and smells.
Common causes of emotional eating
Stress – Have you ever noticed how stress makes you feel hungry? Not just in your mind. When stress is chronic, as it often happens in our chaotic, fast-paced world, your body produces high levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol triggers cravings for salty, sweet, and fried foods — foods that give you a boost of energy and pleasure. The more uncontrolled stress in your life, the more likely you are to turn to food for emotional comfort.
Emotional Filler– Eating can be a way to temporarily silence or “calm” uncomfortable feelings, including anger, fear, sadness, anxiety, loneliness, resentment, and shame. As you drug yourself with food, you can avoid difficult feelings that you’d rather not feel.
Boredom or feeling empty– Do you eat just to give yourself something to do, to relieve boredom, or as a way to fill a void in your life? You feel incomplete and empty, and food is a way to occupy your mouth and your time. In the meantime, it fills you up and distracts you from the feelings behind your lack of intent and dissatisfaction with your life.
Childhood Habits– Think about childhood memories of food. Did your parents reward good behavior with ice cream, take you out for pizza when you got a good report card, or give you candy when you were feeling sad? These habits often carry over into adulthood. Or the dining may be motivated by nostalgia—to remember fond memories of grilling burgers in the backyard with your dad or baking and eating crackers with your mom.
Social Influences– Meeting with other people for a meal is a great way to relieve stress, but it can also lead to overeating. It’s easy to overeat just because there is food or because everyone else is eating. You may also overeat in social situations due to stress. Or maybe your family or circle of friends encourages you to overeat, and it’s easy to get along with the group.
Here are the solutions…
First: keep an emotional diary about eating
You probably recognized yourself in at least some of the previous descriptions. But even so, you’ll want to be more specific. So what are the best ways to identify the patterns behind your emotional intake? First is keeping track of your food and mood diary, every time you eat too much or feel compelled to reach for your version of comfort food.
Take a moment to find out what triggered the urge. If you back off, you will usually find a disturbing event that started your emotional eating cycle. Write down everything in your food and mood diary: what you ate (or wanted to eat), what upset you, how you felt before you ate, what you felt when you ate, and how you felt afterwards.
Over time, you will notice a pattern. You may always end up gorging on the same food after spending time with a critical friend. Or maybe you stress over eating when you’re on a deadline or when you’re attending family functions. Once you have identified your emotional eating triggers, the next step is to identify healthy ways to nurture your emotions.
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