You may turn to food for comfort when going through a difficult situation, feeling down, stressed, or even when bored. If you do that often then you might be dealing with a case of emotional eating.
Emotional eating can be disastrous because emotions are a part of everyday life. Letting your emotions dictate your eating habits can quickly ramp up your calorie intake and lead to obesity and a host of health issues.
I don’t mean that all of the food choices you make to feel good are terrible, but if you tend to eat more than you should when life isn’t going your way, then you might have a problem.
Here’s the good news: There are many measures you can take right now to regain control over your eating patterns.
The following should get you started on your way to regulate and recover from emotional eating. But before we get in the how-to’s, let’s first explain what emotional eating is and its impact on your health and well-being.
Emotional Eating Explained
If you return home at the end of a stressful day and the first thing you do is mindlessly go through an entire tub of ice cream or much on a whole bag of cookies, then you’re an emotional eater.
Emotional eating refers to turning to food to soothe unpleasant emotions, trigger a positive mood, or maintain a positive mood. This destructive eating cycle is often dismissed as an indulgent habit or lack of self-control, but in reality, it’s a manifestation of deeper psychological problems.
Emotional eating can be described as eating to quell feelings, rather than real hunger. It’s when you turn to food to escape an emotional state or as a means to take a break from everyday stresses.
Emotional eating is often tied to unpleasant emotions such as stress, depression, and anxiety, but can also be linked with positive emotions, such as the use of food during happy events such as birthdays, weddings, religious ceremonies, and events.
Comfort Eating Brings No Comfort
Despite the momentary relief, emotional eating is not the remedy to your emotional issues.
By making a crutch out of comfort foods, you set yourself up for a vicious cycle of unhealthy eating, followed by guilt and regret, followed by more unhealthy eating.
It’s Common
If you’ve been a victim of emotional eating, then know that you are not alone. This eating disorder is common among people of all sizes and shapes, and it can manifest in different forms and levels.
Roughly 40 percent of adults admit that they have either consumed unhealthy foods or overeating in the past months due to stress, and more than 50 percent confess to engaging in these behaviors weekly or more often, according to the American Psychological Association.
The Signs
So how can you tell if you’re an emotional eater?
Ask yourself the following questions.
- Do you crave specific food when you’re stressed?
- Do you reach for food without realizing you’re even doing it?
- Do you often reward yourself with food?
- Do you eat when you’re not hungry?
- Do you reach for food because you don’t have anything else to do?
- Does food make you feel comfortable and safe?
- Do you feel like you have no willpower around food?
- You can’t tell whether you were hungry or not when you ate?
- Do you have feelings of embarrassment, guilt, or shame after eating?
- Do you eat at unusual times? Or at odd locations?
- Have you gained a lot of weight lately? Are you already overweight?
- Do other members of your family use food to satisfy their feelings too?
We’ve all fallen victim to emotional eating at one time or the other. But it’s when we are doing it regularly then it’s a source of trouble.
How to Stop Emotional Eating
If your typical response to emotional situations—whether it’s bad or good—is by eating more food than you should, then you should stop it.
Luckily there are solutions. But it’s not going to be an overnight makeover. Building healthy eating habits takes time. You’ll have to look deeper into yourself, find out the triggers, and come up with a plan.
Let’s unpack this.
Learn Your Triggers
To adequately tackle your emotional eating issues, begin by understanding what’s causing them, and why. Without knowing this, there’s no way you can make any progress—especially for the long haul.
So what’s triggering your emotional eating?
- Is it boredom?
- Anxiety?
- Loneliness?
- Depression?
Identifying your triggers will enable you to be one step ahead of your stressful eating so you can either steer clear of these trigger situations or at least make sure to have a defense plan for the next time.
For example, if boredom is the culprit, consider joining a friend or going out to a party and or just being social. Next, write down the emotions that cause you to overeat.
Remind yourself that relying on food for emotional comfort won’t necessarily help you patch up what you’re feeling. It might only make it worse, and you don’t want that.
Permit Yourself to Emote
The next step toward overcoming emotional eating is to see emotional eating for what is: an erroneous way of dealing with emotions. This way you can start consuming food to satisfy physical needs, and not submit to a pattern of using mouth pleasure to distract yourself from dealing with your emotions.
Research shows that the first step toward regulating and having control over one’s emotions is cultivating the ability to identify and describe them as you’re experiencing them.
Begin to notice what’s going on inside of your body and mind when you get overtaken by that urge. Take a mental break before you reach for that food. Breathe deep, and ask yourself, “what is it I’m craving for?”
Come up With a Plan
Failing to plan is planning to fail. We’ve all heard that saying, and couldn’t be more relevant for overcoming emotional eating.
You must have a concrete plan to help you stop from falling into those emotional eating traps.
Here’s the simple formula:
Fill in the blanks:” When (Your trigger), I will (healthier response).
The first blank is the trigger. Examples include:
- I feel anxious
- I feel lonely
- I feel tired
- I feel down
- My boss is an a$$hole
- My family is driving me crazy
- You NAME IT
The second response is the behavior you’ll engage in instead of overeating. Examples include:
- Hit the gym
- Go for a run
- Watch a movie
- Read a book
- Call a friend
- Talk to your mom
- Eat an apple
- Listen to upbeat music
- Take a nap
- Do Yoga
- Meditate
- You Name it (as long it’s something that satisfies that urge but more constructively)
For example, if you feel lonely after work in the evening, ask a friend to join to go to the gym. This not only helps you void excess calories but also promotes healthy exercise.
Conclusion
I won’t deny it. Food does offer some comfort, but as I previously stated, it won’t address the root cause. It’s only a band-aid on a deep wound0.
To combat that urge to eat, you need to understand what’s causing it in the first place then find a healthier alternative to handle these emotions. The rest is just detail.
