What Is Emotional Eating And How Can We Prevent it?

What is Emotional Eating? Stress eating is a form of emotional eating defined as eating in response to feelings rather than hunger. Stress is one of the main culprits of emotional eating. During periods of prolonged and intense stress, the body’s cortisol levels can rise. High levels of cortisol can increase hunger hormones and our desire to eat. In tough times, turning to foods that taste good or provide comfort can offer temporary joy and sometimes a sense of control over our emotions. However, when food is used as a coping mechanism to help deal with difficult or stressful emotional situations like stress, boredom, sadness, anger, or loneliness, it can become a negative cycle that adversely affects health. Using food in this way can lead to physical and emotional weakness and can contribute to significant weight gain. Anyone can experience emotional eating. Our human experiences make us all susceptible to some form of emotional eating. However, people who struggle with expressing emotions or maintaining a work-life balance may be more prone to emotional eating. Those with a history of restrictive eating behaviors or those lacking tools or mechanisms to cope with negative or stressful events are more likely to engage in emotional eating.

How to Stop Emotional Eating? The cycle is always the same. A stressful event happens at work, home, school, on the road, or anywhere else, which seems out of your control. You feel helpless and have no idea how to solve or fix it. Your stress makes you feel physically and mentally drained, and you react as though you're under pressure. To cope with this stress, you eat. This food can be something sweet, salty, fatty, or something you emotionally associate with comfort. When you eat it, you feel better. This is the stress eating cycle, and each time it helps reduce your stress. Emotional eating can derail all your weight-loss efforts. It often leads to overeating (especially with sweet, fatty, and calorie-dense foods), but the good news is that if you're prone to emotional eating, you can take steps to regain control over your habits and achieve your weight loss goals.

Emotional Eating Equals Overeating No matter what triggers emotional eating, the end result is overeating. When the urge to overeat strikes, following through with it adds the guilt of overeating and failure to lose weight to the individual’s problems. This can create a vicious cycle: You overeat to cope with negative emotions from your environment, then feel guilty for failing at weight loss and overeat again. Although negative emotions lead to emotional overeating, you can take steps to control such overeating and rebuild your weight loss goals.

Emotional Eating: Emotional eating is when a person responds to negative emotions such as stress, anger, fear, frustration, and loneliness by eating food in an attempt to suppress those emotions. Major life events can lead to emotional eating and disrupt weight loss: job loss or unemployment, financial pressures, health problems, relationship issues, work stress, bad weather, and fatigue. Of course, people's responses to these conditions vary. Some may eat less in the face of intense emotional states, while others may turn to emotional overeating and snacking. They may eat anything that’s easier to access without even enjoying it, choosing to eat instead of facing an undesirable situation. You may have experienced this yourself, reaching for sweets during stressful times without even thinking about it.

Keep Stress Away: If stress increases your overeating, try coping techniques such as yoga, meditation, or relaxation.

Create a Checklist: Make a list and note when you’re hungry. Are you really hungry? Is your hunger emotional or physical? If you ate recently and your stomach is not empty, you may not be truly hungry. Give yourself a few minutes to let the false craving pass.

Food Diary: Write down what you eat: how much and when. How do you feel while eating and how hungry are you? Over time, this practice can help you establish a logical connection between food and your emotions.

Get Support: People who lack good supportive connections are more likely to engage in emotional eating. Seek help from friends, family, or a supportive community.

Fight Temptation: When you’re not actually hungry, distract yourself from eating by going for a short walk, watching a movie, listening to music, reading, browsing the internet, or calling a friend.

Keep Temptations Away: If you lack self-control, avoid keeping easy-to-reach foods at home or don't go to the supermarket when you're feeling depressed or angry until you're sure you're in a calm and balanced emotional state.

Choose Healthy Snacks: Pick low-fat, low-calorie snacks such as fruits, vegetables, and air-popped grains.

Don’t Deprive Yourself: When following a weight-loss program and limiting calories in your daily diet, your food choices may become repetitive and boring, causing you to crave what you truly enjoy. This can intensify your cravings, especially in emotional situations. Instead, allow yourself to eat a small amount of your favorite food on special occasions, or prepare your favorites in a lower-fat version to enjoy.

Get Enough Sleep: If you’re extremely tired, you may snack to boost your energy. Instead, take a nap or go to bed earlier.

Seek Professional Help: If you've tried to control emotional eating on your own without success, consider consulting a psychologist. A therapist can help uncover the reasons behind your emotional eating and teach you new coping skills. If you have an eating disorder, they can diagnose it (eating disorders are common in people with emotional eating).

Forgive Yourself: If you've engaged in emotional eating at some point in your life, forgive yourself and start fresh today. Learn from your experiences and apply them moving forward. Focus on the positive changes you've made in your eating habits and reward yourself for the healthy changes you've made.

How to Know If You're Emotionally Eating: Engaging in frequent emotional eating or entering a binge cycle—where you overeat and then restrict your food intake to cope with the overeating—can harm your health, leading to weight gain and feelings of shame or even eating disorders. Before reaching that point, you should pay attention to some signs and see if you’ve lost connection with your body by asking yourself these questions:

• Do you eat when you're not physically hungry?

• Do you eat because you're bored?

• Is grabbing a bowl of popcorn while watching TV or a movie a habit for relaxation?

• Do you eat more than usual at a gathering?

These signs may indicate you’ve disconnected from your physical hunger cues and are eating to fill an emotional void.

Identifying Triggers for Emotional Eating: The first step in stopping emotional eating is identifying your personal triggers. What situations, places, or feelings make you turn to food easily? Most emotional eating is associated with unpleasant emotions, but it can also be triggered by positive feelings, like rewarding yourself for achieving a goal or celebrating a happy event or holiday.

Common Causes of Emotional Eating

Stress: Have you ever noticed how stress makes you hungry? It's not just in your mind. When stress is chronic, as it often is in our chaotic and fast-paced world, your body produces high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol triggers cravings for salty, sweet, and fried foods—foods that provide you with energy and pleasure. The more uncontrolled stress in your life, the more likely you are to turn to food for emotional relief. Eating can be a way to temporarily "shut down" or "suppress" uncomfortable emotions like anger, fear, sadness, anxiety, loneliness, resentment, and shame. While you calm yourself with food, you can avoid the painful feelings you’d prefer not to experience.

Boredom or Feeling Empty: Have you ever eaten to pass the time, to relieve tiredness, or as a way to fill the emptiness in your life? You feel unfulfilled and empty, and food becomes a way to occupy yourself and fill the time. In the moment, it satisfies you and distracts you from feelings of aimlessness and dissatisfaction with your life.

Childhood Habits: Think back to your childhood memories of food. Did your parents reward good behavior with ice cream, take you out for pizza when you got good grades, or serve you sweets when you were feeling sad? These habits often carry over into adulthood. Or perhaps your eating is driven by nostalgia—remembering barbecuing hamburgers in the backyard with your dad or baking and eating cookies with your mom.

Social Influences: Getting together with others for a meal is a great way to reduce stress, but it can also lead to overeating. Simply because food is available or because others are eating, it's easy to overindulge. You might also overeat in social situations because you're nervous. Or maybe your family or social circle encourages overeating, and it’s easier to go along with the group. If you don't know how to manage your emotions in ways that don't involve food, you won’t be able to control your eating habits for long. Diets often fail because they offer sensible nutritional advice that only works if you have conscious control over your eating habits. To stop emotional eating, you need to find alternatives to food that you can turn to for emotional satisfaction. Understanding the cycle of emotional eating, or even identifying your triggers, isn’t enough, although it is the first big step. You need a replacement for food that you can rely on for emotional fulfillment.