For some of us, food is like an emotional pacifier. We eat not only when we're hungry, but when we're frustrated, angry, sad, or just plain bored. Emotional eating can be very bad for the waistline -- and for some people, it can morph into a serious eating disorder.
There’s a reason why some of our favorite dishes are referred to as “comfort foods.” For starters, many of us are conditioned from early childhood onward to associate eating with good times. We gather with our families and friends around dinner tables and barbecue grills, stuffing ourselves with as much as we can handle.
We celebrate with food on birthdays, graduations, weddings, and pretty much any other occasion that merits a get-together. In turn, we correlate food – and gorging ourselves silly – with feeling good. Or maybe, as children, we were never taught how to properly deal with stressful situations and turned instead to eating. Or it could be our fear of relationships: unlike real, person-to-person relationships, there’s no risk involved when we substitute with food.
Food will never reject us, throw us over for another person, leave us, or get mad at us – no other relationship we’ve ever been in seems to satisfy our needs so completely; we have the illusion of control because we get to say when, where, and how much we eat (even when it’s way too much and way too often).
Given these explanations, it’s only natural that when our emotional state is less-than-cheery, whether we feel stressed, sad, angry, lonely, or just plain bored, we turn to the one thing that has always made us feel better without fail: a little something to eat. But no matter how satisfied it makes us feel in the moment, it’s only a temporary fix, often leaving us feeling guilty and frustrated – and fat!
How do we recognize emotional eating?
You know you’re an emotional eater when your first response to any sort of emotional distress is to rummage through the cabinets or raid the fridge. Emotional eaters use food to manage their feelings. Even feelings that only give us minor discomfort, such as boredom, can trigger a binge. For example, it’s just an hour after dinner and you’re flipping through the channels.
There’s nothing engaging on TV, and you’re bored. You start a mental inventory of the items in your pantry and refrigerator, and think, “Hmm … cookies sound good.” So you get up and grab the cookies from the shelf, or if you’re a Martha Stewart type, maybe you whip up a batch of your own. Either way, you aren’t focused on your boredom any more.
Once again, food has “saved” you from your negative feelings. It takes your mind off the problem for a while, which is great – but afterward, the problem is still going to be there, and in addition to that you’ll probably feel guilty and disgusting for having eaten so much when you weren’t hungry. It’s a frustrating trap. So how do you help yourself break free?