How To Avoid Emotional Eating

What is emotional eating and why do we do it?

It is when you use food to comfort yourself, to dull a painful emotion, or to distract yourself from feelings that you don’t feel capable of handling. Or, you simply feel overwhelmed by cravings when feeling emotional, bored, sad or anxious.

There are actual studies that show that 75% of overeating is driven by your emotions, not physical hunger.

If you’ve ever found yourself reaching for a bag of chips even when you weren’t hungry, or eating an entire pint of ice cream after a long day at work – it is emotional eating. When your first impulse is to open the refrigerator whenever you’re upset, lonely, exhausted, or bored—you get stuck in an unhealthy cycle.

You end up feeling worse than you did before because of the unnecessary calories you’ve just consumed. You criticize yourself for not having more willpower. Compounding the problem, you have a harder and harder time controlling your weight and feel increasingly powerless over both food and your feelings. 

The thing with emotional eating is that eating when you feel bad only provides temporary relief. 

Many times, there’s a connection between food and emotions that originated in childhood and carries over today. Comfort came in the form of a cup of hot chocolate or some cookies with chocolate chips and years later, you may still connect a sweet with love and feeling cared for. 

Stress hormones and emotional eating.

Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline can trigger cravings for comfort foods like chips and ice cream.

When we are exposed to stress, the adrenal glands will respond by producing the hormone cortisol. Cortisol makes you feel stressed out and for those who are susceptible to emotional eating it can trigger it.

Being mindful and staying connected to what you feel in that moment can reduce the level of stress associated with those feelings.

Too much cortisol can lead to a number of problems:

–  Depression

–  Weight gain

–  Decreased immune function.

–  Raises blood sugar

The difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger:

Emotional hunger comes on suddenly, and feels urgent, like it must be satisfied immediately. There is often a craving for a specific food and a tendency to reach for sweets or other high calorie items. Most people don’t stress-eat lettuce and carrots.

Physical hunger comes on gradually. You haven’t eaten for hours and your stomach growls. When you’re physically hungry, you’re open to options so even an apple sounds good. Physical hunger dissipates when you are full, and you don’t feel bad about yourself after eating.

Here is how you can tell if you are an emotional eater.

If you answer yes to any of the following questions, you may be an emotional eater.

• Do you eat when you’re not hungry or feeling full?

• Do you eat more when you are worried, anxious or sad?

• Do you eat to reward yourself or to celebrate?

• Do you eat until you feel stuffed?

• Does food feel like a best friend?

• Do you eat to feel better, to calm yourself when you’re mad, bored, or tired?

• Do you feel out of control around food?

How you can manage and break the cycle of emotional eating.

Emotional eating can be a hard habit to break, but it is possible. No matter how powerless you feel over food and your feelings, you can make positive changes. With practice and patience anyone can overcome emotional eating by choosing mindful behaviors over unconscious ones.

First of all it is important to recognize your triggers and understanding why you turn towards food in times of stress or boredom. That can help you break this cycle and replace unhealthy habits with healthier alternatives.

For example if your job is causing you a lot of stress. It might be worth looking into ways you can reduce your workload or find more fulfilling work opportunities. 

Or you have feelings about yourself that doesn’t make you happy.

You might take a deeper look at what is making you unhappy so you can heal the problem.

Another situation can be that you feel bored at home all day. Then perhaps you could look into joining an online yoga class or starting a virtual book club with friends. 

Activities will help you feel connected and productive without resorting to food as your only source of comfort and satisfaction.

You will be preoccupied with something worthwhile and by doing so, there isn’t that much time left over to get into emotional eating.

You may not completely understand why you eat emotionally but you can develop tools that can help you with your emotional eating regardless of its origin.

There are some techniques you can learn that can offer healthier ways to deal with emotions, avoid triggers, and conquer cravings. While these techniques may not eliminate emotional eating completely, they may help you reduce its frequency and develop a sense of control over it. These skills give you confidence and a game-plan to address the urges when they arise. 

Here are some tips on how you can turn this around:

To start with it is good to identify your personal triggers.

1.  What situations or feelings get you thinking about food? It doesn’t always have to be negative feelings. It can also be connected to positive feelings, such as rewarding yourself or celebrating or socializing with food. Stress, boredom, and emptiness are also common triggers.

2.  Find other ways to fill the tankand care for yourself. Find out what are some alternatives to food that will help you feel better, taken care of, less anxious. How about phoning a friend, taking a bubble bath, playing a sport, seeing a movie, dancing, meditating, or listening to your favorite podcast?

3.  Keep track with a food and mood log. When you feel like reaching for food identify triggers. Stop for a moment and try to sense and figure out what sparked that urge. Write it down. Since emotional eating is often mindless and automatic, delaying for a few minutes can interrupt the urge, so it can be good to pause. 

4.  Take a break and come back to it later. Don’t tell yourself you can’t have the cookie. Just take a break before you have it. Get up, move around, distract yourself and say that you can have it after five minutes. If when you come back you still want it, fine, otherwise you have managed to shift your attention to something else than emotional eating. In that break, you might very well have realized that you were not hungry at all and that eating the cookie would make you feel worse as soon as it’s gone. It doesn’t last long.

5.  Check up on how you are What is really going on? Sometimes that means learning to accept even the not so good feelings. Allowing yourself to feel uncomfortable emotions is not easy but even the most difficult feelings subside and drift out of our minds, just like a cloud that blocks the sun temporarily. Remember the sun will always shine again. 

6.  Try taking deep breaths before making any decisions about what to eat. This can give you time to make sure your decision comes from a place of conscious awareness instead of unconscious habit.

Here are some natural tips to help you stop emotional eating:

1. Drink Water.

Something so simple as taking a drink of plain water helps because most of the time dehydration can contribute to agitation or irritability,  which are other manifestations of stress that can push us to emotional eating of unhealthy snacks and other things we wouldn’t eat otherwise.

2.  Sip on tea.

A mug with some boiling water, a cinnamon stick, and a teaspoon of honey helps to curb sugar cravings when stressed.

3.  Think long-term

Think of it this way: the pleasure you get from eating comfort foods lasts only about three minutes. If you keep that in mind at all times it can be very helpful. Say to yourself, What is going to make me feel better for longer than 3 minutes? Usually, that is not a cookie.”

4.  Don’t skip meals.

To eat good nutrition is incredibly important for stress management. For example if you do not consume inadequate amounts of magnesium (which is most of us) you may experience increased sugar cravings. It is hard to get all the nutrients you need if you skip meals. And especially if you fill yourself with unhealthy snacks rather than eating nutritious meals.

Final thoughts

So know that no matter what emotions come up throughout the day, whether it is anger, sadness, anxiety or plain boredom, there are better coping mechanisms than turning directly towards food.

Even if emotional eating might be quite hard to break, you can do it! It is possible and if you stick to believing you can do it – you will.

Enjoy your new self free from emotional eating!

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