Techniques You Can Use To Overcome Emotional Eating
What is emotional eating?
Emotional eating is eating as a way to suppress or soothe negative emotions. Sometimes the strongest food cravings hit when you're at your weakest point emotionally. You may turn to food for comfort, consciously or unconsciously, when facing a difficult problem, feeling stressed or even feeling bored.
Although some people eat less in the face of strong emotions, those who emotionally eat often turn to impulsive or binge eating in times of emotional distress. This leads to quickly consuming whatever's convenient without much enjoyment in what they’re eating.
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Why food?
Negative emotions may lead to a feeling of emptiness or an emotional void, and those who suffer from emotional eating see food as a way to fill that void. However this often creates a false feeling of ‘fullness’ and temporary wholeness, and once those unsatisfied feelings return emotional eaters turn to food once more.
Those who suffer from emotional eating could also use food as a means of distraction. They may focus on eating comfort food instead of dealing with an upcoming event or conflict, because it may be a painful situation they’d rather not take part in.
The emotional eating cycle
Occasionally using food as a pick-me-up, a reward, or to celebrate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However when eating is your primary emotional coping mechanism, you then get stuck in an unhealthy cycle where the real feeling or problem is never addressed. This is when your first impulse is to open the refrigerator whenever you’re stressed, upset, angry, lonely, exhausted, or bored.
An emotional eating cycle typically looks something like this:
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Something happens that upsets you
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You feel an overwhelming urge to eat
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You eat more than you know you should
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You feel guilty and powerless over food
Then after you start to feel guilty and powerless over the food you ate, you find yourself back at step one being upset that you feel so guilty and powerless. And this is how the vicious cycle of emotional eating continuous goes. Though it is not impossible to break this cycle, it just takes patience and time.
What usually triggers emotional eating?
While most emotional eating episodes are linked to unpleasant feelings, they can also be triggered by positive emotions, such as rewarding yourself for achieving a goal or celebrating a holiday or happy event. It’s important to recognize your personal triggers for emotional eating, whether they’re because of a place, situation or a feeling. Common triggers of emotional eating could be one or all of the following:
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Stress
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Not feeling your emotions
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Boredom
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Feelings of emptiness
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Childhood habits
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Social influences
Emotional hunger can be a powerful feeling, which is why it’s often easily mistaken for physical hunger.
True physical hunger vs. emotional hunger
Physical and emotional hunger may be easily confused, but there are key differences between the two. True physical hunger cues are typically as followed:
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It develops slowly over time
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You desire a variety of food groups
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You feel the sensation of fullness and take it as a cue to stop eating
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You have no negative feelings about eating
Meanwhile, emotional hunger cues are typically as followed:
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It comes on suddenly and abruptly
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You crave only certain types of food
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You binge on food but don’t feel satisfied
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You feel shame or guilt towards eating
It may also help to pay attention to how and when your hunger starts as well as how you feel after eating.
Techniques to overcome emotional eating
The first and most important step is understanding what emotional eating is and identifying emotional eating are important steps to overcoming this. The following techniques will help to show you how to overcome stress eating in the moment and better manage our food cravings.
However, it is important to remember not one size will fit all. What works for one may not work for all so it is important to find a strategy that works for you. Additionally it’s imperative to remember that it can take our brain a long time to lay down the habit pathway associated with emotional eating. So it will take time and practice to undo this.
Practice mindful eating
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you’ve finished a meal and not remembered actually eating the food? Many of us are focused on something else when we eat, so the act of eating is done on autopilot.
Mindful eating is an important tool to help us become more aware of what we’re eating, how much we’re eating, and why we’re eating it. In the long run, this can help to control your portion sizes and staying in tune with what your body actually needs.
The goal of mindfulness is to practice paying attention on purpose and non-judgmentally to one single thing, which is the complete opposite of multitasking. In the case of mindful eating, this means turning your full attention to the process of choosing, preparing, and eating your food, whether that be meals, snacks, or drinks. The following steps to mindful eating will help you to begin practicing if you have no idea where to start or if you just need a reminder.
1.Remove distractions
The first step to mindful eating is to remove distractions at mealtimes. If you’re preoccupied with your surroundings, such as the TV, phone, driving, or work, it’s difficult to focus on the process of eating entirely.
This often leads to eating more than what your body needs, or eating past the point of fullness. Ideally, try to eat at a table away from your workspace and minimise other distractions. Eating in the company of others is a great way to spend mealtimes, and you can even video chat with friends or family over mealtimes if you’re living alone.
2.Engage your senses
Before eating, take a moment to look at and smell your food. Spend some time reflecting on where your food came from, and how it was grown and prepared. This will help you appreciate what you’re eating and the work that went into getting food on your plate.
As you’re eating the meal, focus on what each element tastes like in your mouth and savour each bite. Are there certain textures or flavours which pair well together? Turn your attention to enjoying the food that you’re eating.
3.Slow down
The next step is to take time to eat your meal. These days, more often than not you eat food on the go or in a hurry while focusing on something else. The 20, 20, 20 strategy is a helpful tool to increase mindfulness around food and eating. At each meal:
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Chew your food for 20 seconds
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Put your fork down for 20 seconds between mouthfuls
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Take 20 minutes to eat your meal.
Concentrate entirely on your food, and even if you feel your mind wandering, carry on. You’ll likely find that you need to eat less as you become more in tune with your body’s hunger signals and more aware of what you’re eating.
Be prepared
Another effective strategy you can try is IF/THEN scenarios. Take a moment to fast-forward to 6 months in the future, and imagine that you’ve failed with your healthy lifestyle changes. Now try and tell the story of why this happened.
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What caused you to go off track?
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What did you struggle with or find difficult?
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Why was it hard to restart?
Now that you have this information, you can start to develop a plan to stop these scenarios from happening in the first place. This is where the IF/THEN scenarios come in. For each barrier or challenge you think you might face in the future, think about the action you’ll take in this situation.
For example:
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IF I’m bored at home and get the urge to visit the pantry, THEN I’ll listen to a podcast, so my mind has something else to focus on
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IF I’m feeling upset after watching the news and I get a craving for ice cream, THEN I’ll sit down and try a brain training app
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IF I had an awful day and feel overwhelmed with a lack of routine, THEN I’ll call my friend for a chat
Try to write down a full list of all the possible scenarios that you foresee as being a potential challenge. Then when you’re faced with these situations in the future, you’ll feel better prepared with a plan to manage them. If you find yourself faced with one of your triggers and your current IF/THEN scenario doesn’t work, it’s okay. It may take a few attempts before you find an alternative outlet that’s really effective in soothing your emotions.
Additionally, the best tasks to do to take your mind off food are cognitively challenging ones. This means going for a walk, meditation, or taking a bath may not be effective ways to distract yourself. However, something that engages your brain can be a better distractor, such as:
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Sudoku puzzles, crosswords, or brain training apps
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Chess, scrabble, or any other board game
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Calling a friend, or listening to a podcast
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Taking a dance class, or learning a musical instrument
Take away the guilt
It’s also important that you try to take away any feelings of guilt that can arise during or after an episode of comfort or emotional eating. One way to do this is to stop labeling foods as good, bad, junk food, or treat. This can foster a negative relationship with food and create an ongoing cycle of comfort eating. Instead, there should be foods you enjoy every day and foods that you enjoy less often.
Try to avoid putting strict rules around food as well, like
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‘I can’t eat a bag of chips during the week’
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‘I’m not allowed to drink soda ever again’
Generally, strict rules tend to have the opposite effect of making you crave these foods even more, then causing feelings of guilt or shame if you break one of these rules. Try to have a more balanced viewpoint, such as
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‘I’ll only have chocolate when I truly feel like it.’
Then allow yourself to enjoy the chocolate when you want it and move on afterwards. At the end of the day, every one of us will have different triggers for emotional eating. Likewise, we need an individualised approach when it comes to feeling in control of our emotions.
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Mindful eating is an effective strategy to help to be more in control of your food choices, and being prepared for emotional eating cravings ahead of time can also help to better manage these in the moment. Remember that an individualised approach when learning to better manage emotional eating is key. It will take time and practice to overcome this and you should approach this process with kindness and acceptance towards yourself.
Extra tips for emotional eating
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Keep an emotional food diary. This can help you keep track of your patterns of emotional eating so that you can identify them more easily in the future.
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Find other ways to ‘feed your feelings’ like taking a brisk walk, practicing yoga or reading a good book.
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Try to take a moment to pause and reflect when you’re hit with a craving, and ask yourself “can it wait 5 minutes?” Then while you’re waiting, check in with yourself and your feelings to find out why you want it.
