How To Tame Emotional Eating
We have all experienced emotional eating at one point or another. The technical definition is eating in order to escape, numb change, or amplify our feelings. Research has indicated that about 75% of all of our eating is emotionally driven. We eat not because we're hungry, because we're bored, we're stressed, we're anxious. Think about that for a moment, 75% of our eating, that's a large number. So it's an incredibly important issue for us to think about and dive into.
Food is a big part of the culture and traditions. The link between what we eat and how we feel is strong. Many big emotional moments in our lives are paired with certain foods. Some individuals rely on food to cope while experiencing a life event; others utilize food after the event is over as a reward or recovery from the event. You stand at the freezer, steaming over a disagreement with someone and searching for ice cream to cool your emotions. You sit on the couch and mindlessly munch through a whole bag of chips after a stressful day. It is because there are parts of the brain that are rewarded from eating high-fat or high-sugar foods. Decades of psychological research suggest that any rewarding behavior is likely to be repeated. Here’s the problem: it works temporarily. The feel-good foods you reach for can make you feel worse. Sometimes the most potent food cravings hit when you're at your weakest point emotionally. When we encounter stress that we perceive as chronic and out of control, we are more likely to reach for food for comfort. When we eat highly rewarding food (aka food that is high in sugar and or fat and usually highly processed), it dampens the activity of our threat response system (TRS). TRS is an intricate network of brain structures that alert us to stress, and we start to feel better. This becomes problematic when the brain gets conditioned to believe that junk food is what we need to feel better during stressful situations. Hence, it actively seeks out these unhealthy foods again and again. Eating comfort food when things get tough—also known as emotional eating or stress eating—is not a solution to life's challenges.
You may be able to stop stress eating or emotional eating by figuring out why you need comfort food. Does it calm you down, cheer you up, compensate you for a tough day, or some combination? Recognizing these thought patterns can make it easier to resist giving in. It also helps to realize that emotional eating doesn't solve the problem that made you upset.
Sudden, urgent cravings
Physical hunger develops slowly over time. After you eat, you may be satisfied for a while and then your hunger is going to grow. You desire a variety of different foods, you feel the sensation of fullness and you can track feeling more satisfied or full as you’re eating. Emotional eating, in contrast, comes on suddenly and might have urgency. You say, ‘I need to eat something. I need some chocolate.’
Craving only specific foods
Not only do your cravings come on suddenly, but you might only want to eat certain foods. If you’re saying to yourself, ‘I don’t want to just eat something because I’m hungry. I want chocolate, and that’s all that’s going to satisfy me,’ it’s a red flag of emotional eating.
Overeating
Overeating is another hallmark of emotional eating. People want food to make them feel better or satisfied. No matter how much they eat, it never really brings them to that feeling until they feel sick or overly full and then they stop eating, But they’re hoping that as they’re eating, it’s going to change their sensation in some way.
Shame or guilt
Feeling emotional distress, like shame or guilt, over your eating habits is another sign.
Mood-Food-Weight cycle
For some, eating may be a way to suppress or soothe negative emotions-stress, anger, fear, boredom, sadness, and loneliness. Major life events or, more commonly, the hassles of daily life can trigger negative emotions that may lead to emotional eating. Although some people eat less in the face of strong emotions, if you're in emotional distress, you might turn to impulsive or binge eating, quickly consuming whatever's convenient without enjoyment. Your relationship with food changes, and you automatically reach for a treat whenever you're angry or stressed without thinking about what you're doing. Food also serves as a distraction. If you're worried about an upcoming event or stewing over a conflict, for instance, you may focus on eating comfort food instead of dealing with the painful situation.
There are many triggers for overconsumption in our culture today. Whatever emotions drive you to overeat, the result is often the same. The effect is temporary, the feelings return, and you likely then bear the additional burden of guilt about taking a step back in your health goals. This can also lead to an unhealthy cycle — your emotions trigger you to overeat, beat yourself up for getting off track, feel bad, and overeat again.
Difficulty distinguishing between physical and emotional hunger
Growing up, you probably leaned on external cues to let you know you were done eating. For example, if you’re eating a plate of food, one of the external cues is when your plate is finished, and you tell yourself, I’m done.’ With emotional eating, you often have trouble telling the difference between these internal cues — which signify physical hunger, or the signs your body sends to let you know it’s time for nourishment — and emotional hunger.
When does emotional eating become a problem?
Occasionally having too much unhealthy food isn’t harmful. Sometimes you just need some chocolate to feel better, and that’s okay. However, this indulgence can be an issue when it happens a lot — or turns into your main coping mechanism. It’s when you’re feeling stressed, and your first or only way of coping is turning to food. That’s often when emotional eating becomes more of a problem or an issue.
To control emotional eating, you have to figure out what your triggers are. The more ways you can think of distracting yourself, the easier it will become over time to stop stress eating. Instead, resisting will become your new habit.
Strategies to Help You Stop Emotional Eating:
Keep a food diary. You might see a pattern that reveals the connection between mood and food. Once you recognize it, develop a strategy to break it. For instance, if you often eat because you think you deserve it after a tough day, remember that you also deserve to maintain a healthy weight, feel healthy, and be proud of yourself. If you eat because of stress, learn to dial back that stress.
Tame your stress. Yoga, meditation, deep breathing, regular exercise help reduce stress levels, temporarily leaving a situation to regain composure and focus, or mental approaches such as looking at alternative ways to interpret the events or looking for options and resources to assist with managing the situation (responding versus reacting).
Practice mindfulness first. The best way to outsmart our reptilian brain, which urges us to eat even when we don't want to, is to practice mindfulness. When in the face of stress, the best thing we can do is slow down and take a couple of deep breaths. This resets our sympathetic nervous systems and allows us to focus on making better decisions, decisions that will serve us in the long run, and not just provide temporary satisfaction.
Reality check. Is your hunger physical or emotional? If you ate just a few hours ago and didn’t have a rumbling stomach, you're probably not hungry. Give the craving time to pass.
Seek support. You're more likely to give in to emotional eating if you lack a good support network. Lean on family and friends. Have a go at writing down:
Five people, you can call when you feel down, upset, or need to vent.
Five ways you like to relax (e.g., go for a walk, take a hot bath, play with your dog, listen to music, read).
Five places you go to calm down (e.g., your bed, outdoors, to the water fountains, your game room).
Five things you can say to yourself (e.g., “you’ve got this,” “this feeling will pass”).
Five activities you can do to distract yourself (e.g., start a puzzle, watch a film).
Fight boredom. We often engage in a lot of activities and receive plenty of external stimulation from screens and people. When there is a void in stimulation, food is usually utilized to fill this void. Instead of snacking when you're not hungry, distract yourself and substitute a healthier behavior. The best distractions from emotional eating are things that take only about five minutes—just long enough to help you switch gears. Some ideas for switching gears include:
Take away temptation. Don't keep hard-to-resist comfort foods in your home. Yours truly never keeps ice cream at home. And if you feel angry or blue, postpone your trip to the grocery store until you have your emotions in check.
Don't deprive yourself. When trying to lose weight, you might limit calories too much, eat the same foods repeatedly, and banish treats. This may just serve to increase your food cravings, especially in response to emotions. Eat satisfying amounts of healthier foods, enjoy an occasional treat, and get plenty of variety to curb cravings.
Don’t let yourself get too hungry. You’ve probably heard the term “hangry,” a portmanteau of “hungry” and “angry” used to describe someone who gets irritable when they’re past time to eat. Making sure you stave off this mood — for example, eating proteins can help you stay full for longer — is a good bet.
Consider taste hunger. Taste hunger is when food just sounds good! It doesn’t matter whether you are hungry or not. Like candies, cookies, ice-cream, hot chocolate, etc. This is not emotional eating. If you’re feeling the desire to eat something sweet after your meal, maybe that’s just what you need to hit the satisfaction factor. If you’ve identified that you’re 100% not physically hungry, it’s not taste hunger, and no amount of food will fill you up, then it’s likely that you’re experiencing emotional hunger.
Snack healthy. Fresh fruit, vegetables with low-fat dip, nuts, and unbuttered popcorn. How does that sound? Overeating processed snacks can raise levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Unbuttered popcorn will provide you with the feel-good hormone serotonin. It’s a whole grain, and you’ll also get antioxidants and far fewer calories than chips. Roasted chickpeas are another great crunchy option with protein and fiber to fill you up. If stress, anger, or sadness trigger your sweet tooth, remember this: The sugar high comes with a low afterward. This low can lead to increased cravings later. Sweets and processed foods can even make specific mental concerns, including symptoms of depression, worse. As an alternative to your favorite candy, cake, or pies, keep a bowl of sweet fruit out in the open. Studies show you’re more likely to eat fruits and veggies when they are easy to access. One easy option is to keep frozen berries on hand that can quickly be thrown into a blender to make a healthy sorbet. Vitamin D-rich foods can improve your mood, so stock up on fortified milk and cereals, eggs, mushrooms, and fish like salmon.
Eat mandarin oranges. Not only are mandarin oranges portable, and easy to peel and eat, but they’re rich in vitamin C, which can help boost your immunity. Plus, citrus smells so good, it’s a stress reliever.
Choose foods that fight stress. How about trying hot tea in emotional situations? It turns out there’s more to it than soothing steam. Tea often contains helpful antioxidants. And green tea, matcha tea, and white tea contain an amino acid called L-theanine that may help reduce stress levels. If you tend to snack late at night, try dark cherries. Not only do they take care of sweet cravings, but they also increase the natural levels of melatonin to help you sleep. Likewise, salmon and other fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids may help with sleep. Dark chocolate (at least 72% cacao), whole grains, nuts, legumes, and fruits and vegetables all play a part in maintaining a healthy mind. The key is stocking up on foods that help with your stress or emotions and avoiding processed junk that might make you feel worse.
Create your list of other options. Our best tool to combat stress eating is to create a list of other activities that will make us feel better without the guilt that overeating often brings. Research tells us that other things will generate a response similar to what junk food brings without the guilt and frustration of overeating. These are things like connection, mindfulness, meditation, exercise. These things will also naturally dampen your threat response system and help you manage stress more effectively.
Learn from setbacks. If you have an episode of emotional eating, forgive yourself and start fresh the next day. Try to learn from the experience and plan how you can prevent it in the future. Focus on the positive changes you're making in your eating habits and give yourself credit for making changes that'll lead to better health.
What else can help?
If you're unsuccessful in trying to stop stress eating on your own, consider cognitive behavioral therapy. It helps with a cognitive restructuring that encourages you to discover and expose negative and unproductive ways of thinking—such as grabbing that chocolate bar—and teaches you to replace these thinking patterns with more desirable ones.
Next time you have a stressful situation, you might say to yourself, "I'm agitated, but if I eat to soothe myself, I'll feel upset about my weight. Instead, I'll go for a walk so I can calm down and feel better."
It may take a combination of approaches to stop stress eating. The goal is to introduce newer, more adaptive options. Beyond these tips, it bears repeating: If you need medical help to address emotional issues, ask for it.
References: https://bit.ly/3k5GkZZ
Published 8/2/2020
Updated 11/15/2021
Dr. Amar Singh, MD, and Dr. Poonam Singh, MD, are board-certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine and American Board of Obesity Medicine. They specialize in preventing, treating, and reversing chronic diseases using an evidence-based holistic approach. They are specifically interested in weight management, hormone rebalancing, and longevity. The American College of Physicians has recognized them as Fellows, FACP, for their excellence and contributions made to both medicine and the broader community. They enjoy teaching, volunteering, and advocating for their patients