Emotional eating is a coping mechanism or way of regulating emotions not a lack of willpower. It’s different from physical hunger as the urge to eat with emotional eating often comes on suddenly, it feels like something that needs to be satisfied urgently and happens even when you’re physically full.
Why do I do this?
It’s really normal for people use food as a reward or comfort. For example, how many times have you heard someone say they’re having a takeaway on a Friday night to relax after a heavy week or that they’re treating themselves because they got a promotion. Food is often soothing and accessible so it makes sense you go to it when want to celebrate or commiserate.
However, the more you do this, the more of a habit it becomes that you use food to cope and you find that you are eating when your body doesn’t need more food. Often after emotional eating, you feel better in the short-term but then guilt and shame kick in and those feelings can then lead to further emotional eating.
“Just have more willpower”
Now more than ever, food noise and hunger is being framed as something to ignore or delay. But whilst this undermines your body’s physical hunger, it also dismisses the emotional function of eating. If eating at times feels like your only option when you’re overwhelmed, being told to ignore hunger or distract from it means your emotional needs don’t get addressed and places you in an all-or-nothing scenario of I either eat to manage or I do nothing.
What do I do?
Start by noticing what situations, places or thoughts lead you to emotionally eat. Writing this down in the notes app on your phone will help you build up a picture over time of common patterns that are linked to emotional eating. Doing this often gets overlooked because you might think this isn’t stopping or changing my emotional eating but knowing what your triggers and patterns for emotional eating build your understanding. Without understanding the function of your emotional eating, you can’t do something about it.
Think about what your goal is. If you didn’t emotionally eat, what would be different? Is it that you’d be more present with your friends or you’d feel less overwhelmed? Simply saying “I want to stop emotionally eating” is completely understandable but when change is centred on the absence of something without knowing clearly what you would like to be different in your life, this can seem unachievable and feel hopeless.
When you notice the sudden urge to emotionally eat, pause and ask yourself “am I hungry or do I want to eat because I’m overwhelmed?” If the answer is the latter, ask yourself “what am I noticing in my body?”, “what is this feeling saying to me?”.
Doing something that changes your body’s physiological state when you’re overwhelmed sends signals to your brain that you’re safe and slows down that sense of urgency. Try changing your body temperature by holding an ice pack or ice cubes on your eyes or cheeks for 30 seconds. Or, pace your breathing:
1. Breathe deeply into your belly.
2. Slow your pace of inhaling and exhaling down to 5-6 breaths per minute.
3. Breathe out slower than your breathe in: breathe in for 5 seconds and breathe out for 7.
Eating when you’re overwhelmed or to manage difficult emotions can feel like your only option at times. I’ve worked with many clients who felt hopeless that they would be able to cope any other way. But, with patience and practice, their emotions became less overwhelming and they began to feel less out of control and build emotional resilience.
If you’re fed up of being stuck in the relentless shame spiral or eating past the point of comfort, click below to download your free e-guide for practical and compassionate tools on how to change this.