Emotional eating is a coping mechanism some people use to deal with unwanted feelings. It’s not a formal eating disorder, but healthy strategies are available to help you cope. Relationship conflicts, pressures at work and financial stressors are just a few of the influences that can negatively impact your mood. Sometimes food can be the comfort that gets you through a rough day. Some people regularly rely on food to manage their moods. For them, emotional eating is automatic and habitual.
What is emotional eating?
Emotional eating is the impulse to eat in response to unpleasant emotions. Eating might seem like a harmless way to cope with unhappiness or stress, but emotional eating may cause you to eat more food than you need. It can also prompt you to make less-than-ideal food choices. You might feel too upset to prepare a healthy meal and opt for convenience foods instead. Or you might choose calorie-laden and nutritionally sparse comfort foods solely for their flavour.
Signs of Emotional Eating
Common signs of emotional eating include: eating when upset, rapid eating guilt about having eaten, more frequent consumption of fast-food, overeating, specific food cravings and unintentional weight gain If you find yourself eating impulsively when you’re upset, you’re not alone. About one in five people engage in emotional eating often or very often.
Causes of Emotional Eating
Though there’s a broad range of emotions a person can feel, and the following negative emotions can trigger emotional eating including: distress, anger, anxiety, sadness and boredom. Research also suggests that less emotional eating occurs as we age.
Stopping Emotional Eating
There are also steps you can take on your own to manage emotional eating behaviour. Finding alternative coping strategies such as the following may be one way to curb emotional eating tendencies:
1. Journaling
Journalling can be an excellent way to become more aware of and deal with painful emotions.
2. Mindfulness meditation
Mindfulness meditation is a way to notice your emotions about a stressful event in a nonjudgmental way. Mindful eating strategies include: paying attention to whether you’re hungry and when you become full, eating slowly, taking small bites and savouring each one and keeping a food log and thinking about what you’re eating
3. Forgiveness
When you’re dealing with a broken heart or feel someone hurt or betrayed you, forgiveness may be one of the best emotion-focused coping strategies.
4. Acceptance
Acceptance doesn’t mean you have to be fine with what happened. Instead, it means that you choose to make peace with the challenge or event, changing your emotional response to it.
5. Talking about it
Suppressing emotions can be an example of maladaptive emotion-focused coping. Its opposite may be openly acknowledging and expressing your emotions. You can do this with yourself, by journaling for example, or with a trusted loved one or a mental health professional.
6. Exercise
Exercise may lessen the impact of negative emotions and depression which can lead to emotional eating.
7. Food Choices
Removing sugary and fat-laden foods from your home reduces your access to addictive food items. Keeping washed and cut vegetables in the fridge ready for snacking turns emotional eating into an opportunity to consume extra nutrition.
