How Meal Services Could Trigger Emotional Eating
What is emotional eating?
Emotional eating is using food to fill your emotional needs, rather than your stomach, in the hopes that it will fix your emotional problems. Emotional eating doesn’t fix your problems and usually makes you feel worse. Moreover, the aftermath of emotional eating typically results in feeling guilty for overeating, on top of your remaining original emotional issue.
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:
Stress
Not feeling your emotions
Boredom
Feelings of emptiness
Childhood habits
Social influences
Emotional hunger can be a powerful feeling, which is why it’s often easily mistaken for physical hunger.
Emotional hunger vs physical hunger
When it comes to hunger it’s important to know how to distinguish emotional hunger from physical hunger. And if you regularly use food to deal with your feelings, finding the difference between the two might be a little more difficult. But there are clues you can look for to help tell the two apart.
The signs of emotional hunger can be any or all of the following:
It comes on suddenly
It feels like it needs to be satisfied right away
It craves specific comfort foods
It isn’t satisfied with a full stomach and forces you to overeat
The signs of physical hunger can be any or all of the following:
It comes on gradually
It can wait to be satisfied
It is open to options, lots of things sound good
It stops when you’re full
Many emotional eaters turn to food for comfort or stress relief, and usually indulge in junk foods, sweets, and other comforting, unhealthy foods. However, sometimes the food that triggers emotional eating could be healthy.
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What are meal services?
Meal services are delivered to your door and include step-by-step recipes with fresh, pre-measured ingredients. Some popular ones that you may know of are Hello Fresh and Blue Apron. These services are great, healthy pre-planned options that make cooking meals extremely easy, even if you’re not the best at cooking.
Who are meal services good for?
These services are a great alternative for anyone who is:
Living a super busy lifestyle
Eating fast food regularly and displaying negative eating habits
In search of nutrient dense meals
Not worried about portion sizes
A lack of organization around meal times
Easily overwhelmed by grocery shopping
These meal services are in a boom right now because of the pandemic, and are great for people who feel unsafe while grocery shopping. And while these services are great for those looking to get more in tune to their health and wellness, it might do just the opposite for some and trigger emotional eating.
How they can trigger emotional eating
Sometimes something that’s meant to be helpful, like these meal services, can actually be harmful to an emotional eater. These meal services come with 4-5 days worth of food, and each meal could be anywhere from 2 to 4 serving sizes. So when you’re an emotional eater who struggles with binge eating and purging, the idea of having so much food all at one time can be very triggering. Moreover, the bulk and abundance aspect of these meal services could then trigger even more issues for an emotional eater.
Compulsive urgency is triggered
The idea of having food for an entire week can often trigger that compulsion urgency inside you and force you to finish everything quickly because you feel you need to.
Becoming stressed if the plan changes
If you decide to go out to eat on a night that you had one of the meals planned could cause you to become stressed because your plans are changing.
Creates pressure that results in guilt
The pre-planned meals and recipes could create pressure on you to follow through with them, and when you don’t it might create feelings shame and guilt.
Worrying what will happen to the food
If you choose not to eat the pre-planned meal one night, you might end up worrying that the extra food will go to waste and because you don’t want it to sit in the fridge, you eat it anyways.
Experiencing food overwhelm
All this food in your house might cause you to become overwhelmed and make you worry that you won’t be able to eat all of it; so you force yourself to eat it all so it doesn’t go to waste.
Why a ‘boring’ food routine is a safe bet
Even though these meal services provide healthy foods and a great variety of recipes, emotional eaters might benefit more from a simple food schedule and routine. While it may seem boring, a simple food routine is a good way for those who suffer from emotional eating to set anchors and boundaries. And these anchors and boundaries are the first steps to trusting yourself around food again. Here are some of the benefits of partaking in a simple food routine and schedule:
It makes you feel safe
A simple food routine can make you feel safe when it comes to food because it gives you everything that you know you need and nothing that you don’t. It’s less likely to trigger emotional eating because you know what foods you need in order to feel safe from your triggers, unlike a meal service that does not know.
It gives you flexibility
A simple food schedule gives you that flexibility you need around your meals and eating times. It’s less likely to trigger emotional eating because when you have that flexibility you won’t become stressed or overwhelmed if you decide to do something different one night.
It gives you leeway
A simple food routine gives you the freedom to move your meal plans around your schedule. It’s less likely to trigger your emotional eating because a simple food routine is not pre-planned so if you dont end up eating a meal one night or for lunch that you had originally planned, there’s no sense of urgency to eat it.
It won’t cause overwhelm or guilt
A simple food schedule won’t cause you to feel guilty or overwhelmed around the meals that you’re eating. It’s less likely to trigger emotional eating because you won’t have that abundance of food around your house to make you feel overwhelmed enough to eat all of it, and then cause you to feel guilty.
Ways to feel safe around food
Because everyone is different and struggles with emotional eating differently, it might take a while until you find your own routine that makes you feel safe around food. It’s really important to be able to feel safe around food, and while emotional eating may make it difficult, there are certain ways to help make you feel more safe.
While these tips may not work for everyone, they are a good base point for feeling safe around food after an emotional eating episode.
Food shop every 2-3 days
Keeping more fresh foods in your house
Try not to have pre-packaged & convenience foods
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We can’t get sober from food, so the practice of finding safety around food is an extremely personal endeavor because recovering from emotional eating is a life long journey. Sometimes you might experience a trigger, and while it may often come as a surprise to you, it can also help you to reinforce your needs.
Extra tips for emotional eating
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.
Find other ways to ‘feed your feelings’ like taking a brisk walk, practicing yoga or reading a good book.
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.
Practice mindful eating. By eating more mindfully, you can help focus your mind on your food and the pleasure of a meal to curb overeating.
