Emotional Eating
Many of us turn to food for stress relief or to soothe negative emotions.
But what’s so special about food in relieving negative emotions?
The festive season is often a happy time but can also be stressful and filled with mixed emotions. With a full fridge and a lot of delicious snacks around you, emotional eating is likely to happen. When you eat your favorite gingerbread cookie or candy, your brain’s reward system gets activated and you feel better. It results in dopamine release, which is a neurotransmitter responsible for triggering feelings of pleasure, bliss or euphoria. We’ve all experienced emotional or comfort eating, which isn’t a problem if it occurs occasionally. Unfortunately, these feelings of pleasure can become addictive. Especially when we’re feeling upset, down or lonely, we turn to food for these pleasurable feelings. This can turn into a very unhealthy habit.
Comfort eating only numbs your emotional pain temporarily and doesn’t fix emotional problems. It often leads to additional feelings of regret or guilt for overeating. This can turn into a vicious cycle where instead of learning to deal with your emotions in a healthy way, overeating and weight gain make you feel even less in control.
Signs you might be an emotional eater
● Do you eat to make yourself feel better?
● Do you tend to eat when you are feeling stressed or in response to a certain situation?
● Do you often feel an urgent need to eat that needs to be satisfied immediately?
● Do you crave specific foods (E.g. “I really need ice cream right now”)
● Do you eat when you’re not hungry?
● Do you feel guilty about eating?
Emotional eating triggers
It can be helpful to figure out what causes you to reach for comfort food. Most often the triggers will be negative emotions like stress, anger, boredom, frustration, loneliness, loss, depression or childhood habits (being rewarded for good behavior). Emotional eating can also be associated with rewarding yourself for achieving goals etc.
Overcoming emotional eating
Since emotional eating is most often an automatic response to certain feelings, it’s important to understand how you feel when you start to engage in it.
Start a diary where you note down your emotions and what happened before you engaged in comfort eating and how you felt afterwards. Over time you will notice patterns and details in your behavior.
A few things you can try to control emotional eating
When you identify the emotions that trigger eating, try to accept them, let them be and don’t fight them. It’s okay to feel these emotions, which can help make them dissipate faster. It can also be helpful to talk about them with a good friend or trusted person.
Mindful eating: When you eat, try to be fully there with your attention. Slow down and pay attention to the flavors and texture of your food. Don’t eat while you’re doing other things. Explore what you need at this moment. Is it really food or an emotional need that needs to be satisfied?
Scheduled eating: Only eat at scheduled times and avoid snacking in between.
Find alternatives to alleviate negative emotions: This is very personal and can range from finding ways to overcome boredom to activities you enjoy to relieve stress.
Very important: Eat a healthy diet, get enough sleep and exercise daily!
Emotional eating isn’t easy to overcome alone, and you don’t need to. If you struggle, working with a qualified psychotherapist and online consultations are as effective as in person.
You can contact me for more information: admin@alfordjeremy.com