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?
Figure the trigger.
In order to get to the root of the problem, start a food journal to help you recognize your patterns. For a few weeks, without changing your eating habits, write down what you eat, when you eat it, and how you’re feeling at the time. What seems to trigger your emotional eating episodes – were you bored? Frustrated with work? Angry at a friend or family member?
Once you’ve given yourself a little while to track your routine, go back over your food journal. It should be easy to spot a pattern when it’s written in black and white in front of you. When you identify your specific binge triggers, it will be much easier to know when to expect them, and in turn, how to deal with the emotion itself instead of trying to mask it with food. Learn what emotion you’re avoiding, and be brave enough to tackle it head-on!
List your alternatives.
While you’re writing everything down, make yourself a list of things you can do instead of eat when the urge strikes. Like any craving – cigarettes, for example, if you’re trying to stop smoking – finding a distraction can be a valuable tool. Most likely, it’s distraction that you really want, anyway … not food. You can find something else to do for a while, preferably something that gives you a little exercise in the meantime: walking the dog, cleaning the house, turning on some music and dancing, going for a bike ride. Remove yourself from the situation; if you’re sitting there staring at the refrigerator, no matter how well you occupy yourself, your thoughts are going to go right back to the ice cream in the freezer.
Learn to distinguish between emotional and physical hunger.
Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between an actual physiological need for food and a psychological want. Real, physical hunger comes on gradually, giving you progressive signals that it’s time to eat – first small gurgles, then large rumbles. It can be satisfied with a variety of foods, not one specific item. It is body-based, happening out of physical need, and you’ll feel the effects: a rumbling, gnawing stomach, or light-headedness.
Emotional eating, on the other hand, comes on suddenly – you weren’t even thinking about food one minute, and the next you’re famished – and is an urgent feeling, as if you must eat now. It is emotionally based, or “above the neck,” originating in the mind and in the mouth. It is usually a craving for a specific food, not just food in general; your mouth wants to taste a cheeseburger and nothing else will satisfy. It’s accompanied by some sort of emotional discomfort and involves absentminded or automatic, hand-to-mouth eating – like when you realize you’ve eaten the entire bag of chips when you only intended to have a handful.
Lay some ground rules.
When a craving strikes, make yourself wait for twenty to thirty minutes before you indulge it. During this time, you can consider whether or not you really need what you’re craving, identify why you think you need it, and come up with acceptable alternatives. Usually after the allotted time has passed, so will the craving; if it doesn’t, allow yourself to have a little bit of whatever it is you want. Or tell yourself that you can have it only after you’ve downed two glasses of water; chances are that when you drink that much, you’ll be too full to eat, anyway.
Organize your eating schedule.
Give yourself some structure – three meals a day, plus two snacks, and stop eating two hours before bedtime. When your body is accustomed to eating on a schedule, you’re more likely to be hungry at the same times of day and eat accordingly, not just whenever the mood strikes. Having an eating schedule also makes you more likely to designate time to actually savor your food instead of wolfing it down compulsively, which can make a big difference.
Don’t diet.
When emotional eaters go on a diet, all we do is turn our food-obsessed thoughts into diet-obsessed thoughts. It may be effective at first, but we will inevitably slip up and blow the diet. Then we feel like failures for doing so, and experience guilt and shame, which sends us immediately back into food-obsessed mode. We think we can’t do it, and those self-defeating thoughts lead to self-defeating behaviors. Again, the best alternative for emotional eaters is to first deal with the problems which are causing us to overeat, the issues we’re “stuffing” with food. Then we can work on actually losing the weight.
Learn to eat in moderation.
After you’ve learned to deal with your root issues, you can begin to change your eating habits and attitude towards food. Don’t deprive yourself of your traditional “comfort foods” because this can be emotionally difficult. Instead, divide them into appropriate portion sizes – eat your chips from a sandwich baggie instead of straight from the bag they came in; that way, you’re only getting one portion rather than eating enough for five people.
Recognize when it’s gone too far.
Many of us are guilty of using food for self-soothing at some point or another; we’re occasional emotional eaters. Compulsive overeaters, however, do it on a regular basis – they are unable to stop. At its worst, emotional eating can lead to disorders such as bulimia and chronic health difficulties stemming from being overweight: high blood pressure, diabetes, heart ailments, mobility problems, high cholesterol, and a whole host of other very undesirable situations. Signs that emotional eating has crossed the line into a serious problem may include:
Bingeing
Depression
Feelings about self-worth based entirely on weight
Belief that you’d be a better person if only you were thin
Feeling out of control of your eating habits
Attributing any failures in your life to your weight
Mentally “beating yourself up” after a binge
Withdrawing from normal activities because you’re embarrassed about your weight
Hiding food from your loved ones, or lying about how much you’ve eaten
Eating very little in front of others, then gorging when you’re alone
Compulsive overeating is a true addiction, just like drugs or alcohol, and needs to be taken as seriously as other life-threatening eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. Instead of receiving the proper treatment for their disorder, the majority of compulsive overeaters are sent to health spas and weight loss programs. Diets absolutely will not work for these kinds of people; they can cut calories indefinitely, but will never reach success until the emotional reasons at the root of the binges are dealt with.
Unfortunately, food isn’t something that overeaters can just give up. It isn’t something that a person can go through rehab for and quit doing, since we need food for survival. Overcoming compulsive eating requires professional treatment such as psychotherapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and sometimes drug therapy such as antidepressants. If you think you or someone you love might have this problem, we’ve included links to some helpful eating disorder resources.