We eat as a way to nourish our bodies and give it the things it needs to function on a daily basis. However, food is not just nutrients and energy, is it? If it was, we could just take something like a food capsule that contained everything we need. The truth is that we get more from food than just nutrition. Eating should be a pleasurable experience too. Most of us like to eat! Sometimes we even use food as a way to make us happy or soothe ourselves. Emotional eating is extremely common, but doesn’t tend to be pleasurable. Emotional eating tends to trigger more negative emotions, so it becomes an endless cycle.
You might not be able to put a stop to emotional eating completely, but you can start to heal from it and create a healthier pattern and relationship with food, making it much less frequent.
How Do I Know if I’m Experiencing Emotional Eating?
Emotional eating is, when we use food to comfort, nurture, distract, numb or soothe ourselves with food. It’s a reaction to a feeling. We know that while food can help to distract or numb, it doesn’t help fix the real issue. After an emotional eating experience, we’re often left with a food hangover, in other words, shame and self judgment, and we’re still left with the original issue that caused us to emotionally eat in the first place.
Because you’re human, you’ve probably had at least one emotional eating episode in your life.
Here are some scenarios you may be able to identify with…
- Eating out of boredom
- Eating because you had a stressful day or stressful event
- Eating to comfort yourself after a difficult interaction with someone
- Eating to procrastinate, something to do to take up time before doing other tasks
- Eating to avoid big feelings
- Eating as a reward at the end of the day, as a way to recognize your accomplishments
Do you resonate with any of the above experiences? Have you felt out of control, with the need to eat taking over, and then beat yourself up about doing it afterwards? Trust me, you’re not alone!
Eating to deal with your emotions doesn’t make you a bad person, it just means you have some progress to make when it comes to healing your relationship with food. Eating triggered by emotion isn’t a problem in itself. Creating healthier reactions when it comes to our feelings is what’s important.
Where Does Emotional Eating Come From?
Food is an emotional experience. We use it to celebrate, soothe, comfort and connect as a community. Think of the holiday traditions and rituals that we have associated with food. It’s totally normal to have an emotional association with different foods. With the cultural importance of food with celebrations, it’s not a surprise that we also have positive emotions associated with eating.
And often, during painful moments, food can be your only friend. It’s totally normal. Food has served a purpose. It may have been the most easily accessible (or only) way to soothe ourselves when we were kids.
Now as adults, we get to build other coping mechanisms beyond food. There’s nothing wrong with using food for emotional support, but it shouldn’t be your only resource. That’s when it becomes problematic.
How Can I Start to Heal?
The first step in reducing emotional eating is to become aware of when we’re doing it. Sometimes we don’t even realize that our emotions are what’s triggering our desire to eat. So we first need to bring some awareness to our feelings. These often show up as sensations in our bodies before we can even name the feelings. There is something called the 90 second pause, which allows you to acknowledge the feelings, feel the feelings and let them pass. I share this tool with my clients who are struggling with emotional eating.
A lot of times we use food as a way to numb or distract ourselves from big feelings, but we know that doesn’t solve anything. It just delays the feelings and causes more issues in the long run.
It can also feel a little scary at first to think about allowing and processing our feelings if we’re not used to doing that. But, the whole point is to process them, so we can let them go and move on with our lives. It really is ok to feel our feelings. Feelings aren’t a bad thing, they’re just internal signals letting us know that something needs to be addressed. So, when we start to allow ourselves to feel them, we can start to change our reactions and behavior toward them. If you’d like to find out more about this technique and how to use it, I invite you to book a free call with me.
Other Factors Impact Emotional Eating
There are several factors that contribute to emotional eating. If we don’t address these things, we’ll only be making it that much harder on ourselves when trying to heal our relationship with food. These things are essential when it comes to meeting our biological needs. If our biological needs aren’t met, we won’t be able to heal effectively. Having unmet needs leads to cravings.
A few of the things these biological needs include the following:
- Nourishment: You cannot heal your emotional eating when you are in a primal or biologically hunger state, meaning you are biologically underfed. You must be eating consistently and adequately before addressing your emotional eating. Your body needs to know that it can trust that it will be nourished.
- Sleep: 8-10 hours a night regularly, you may already know that lack of sleep can make us “hangry” and reach for food for extra energy during the day. It also alters our hormones making us hungrier and more emotional. So, prioritize your sleep as much as possible.
- Life Balance: Are you over working? Are you craving extra social time with friends? Do you need more downtime? Do you need a childcare break? Depending on what season of life you are in, this might be harder to change. Take inventory of where you have some unmet desires that you want to bring greater attention and care to.
These are just a few of the things that impact our ability to heal from emotional eating. These and the other factors involved are the things that I work with my clients on in their journey to healing their relationship with food and emotional eating.
Making these things a priority and using the 90 second pause can all be used to heal your struggle with emotional eating. Learning to feel our feelings and allowing ourselves self compassion can also reduce the feeling of shame and guilt that we might have in response to eating emotionally. We can learn from our experiences and create healthier ways to handle these situations. It’s a process and most likely won’t be solved overnight, although I have had clients experience great success in a short period of time doing these things, as well as some other techniques that I offer.
Always keep in mind that it’s about progress, not perfection! Improving a little each day will make us healthier. And it’s never too late to start. We can have new beginnings every day. So even if yesterday didn’t go as well as you’d like, you can make today better. Striving for perfection will just create extra stress and frustration, possibly leading to even more emotional eating. The key is to do what you can when you can.
Next Steps
Because it can feel overwhelming and possibly even unsurmountable, I want to encourage you to just start with one small step as you try to overcome your emotional eating. If you struggle with any of the basic needs list above, start there! Not getting enough sleep? Check out my 15 Ways to Improve Sleep! Feeling out of balance and need more joy in your life? Start by scheduling in 10-15 minute breaks in the day that are just for you to do something you enjoy (ex. read a book, dance around the living room, or go outside and breath some fresh air).
Small actions might not be a quick fix, but they will lead to the right place over time. If you’re still feeling unsure about how to proceed and would like some guidance and support, book a free call! Let’s chat!
