Break the cycle of stress eating and build a healthier relationship with food.
We receive a confusing tangle of wildly divergent messages about food from the moment the first spoonful hits our mouths. We’re taught that food is fuel. Food is comfort. Food is love. But we’re also handed the insidiously subversive message that food is the enemy—that it can rob us of physical perfection—a state none of us will ever achieve, but society tells us we must do anything to reach. The joyous linchpin of a million holidays celebrated with family and friends, food is the legal drug we must take to survive, while staying ever vigilant about an overdose.
With such disparate messages about our nutritional intake, is it any wonder we feel like we’re in a constant battle between our desire to indulge and the guilt we feel for indulging? If you find yourself dealing with sadness, emptiness, or even joy by diving into a bag of your favorite chips or spooning up a couple of scoops of chocolate ice cream instead of processing your feelings, you’re probably experiencing emotional eating.
In this blog, you’ll learn what emotional eating means, what to look for if you think you’re experiencing it, substitutions for eating emotionally, its connection to eating disorders, as well as healthy ways to deal with emotional eating.
What Is Emotional Eating?
Emotional eating is eating in response to emotions rather than physical hunger. Stress, sadness, loneliness, boredom, and even positive emotions can trigger cravings or eating when you aren’t physically hungry. Recognizing these emotional triggers can help you develop healthier ways to cope and improve your relationship with food.
Emotional eating is using food to stifle emotions rather than dealing with them as they arise. Instead of feeding our hunger, we use our favorite go-to salty indulgence to calm jangled nerves, distract ourselves from future worries, or reward ourselves for a recent accomplishment.
An everyday coping mechanism for many of us, emotional or “stress eating” often swims in the wake of trauma, sadness, depression, or feelings of isolation and boredom, but it can also surface when life is good, such as when we celebrate landing that job we’ve always wanted by over-indulging at the dinner table.
Physical Hunger vs. Emotional Hunger
Unlike physical hunger, emotional hunger hits us like a freight train, driving cravings for foods that aren’t good for us (usually those in fat, sugar, or carbs). When we bite into our favorite sweet treat, a switch flips in our brain, releasing a healthy dose of endorphins and giving us the comfort and distraction we crave when bad feelings hit.
Stress eating also tempts us to keep partaking even when we feel full and then leaves us riddled with regret because we’ve over-indulged. And if we’re looking to GLP-1s to solve our craving problem, we’re out of luck, since their primary purpose is to curb physical hunger, not emotional triggers like loneliness or boredom.
Signs You May Be Experiencing Emotional Eating
To figure out whether the eating you’re doing is emotional or not, take a look at the way you’re imbibing, when it happens, and the reason you’re doing it in the first place. Signs that you may be eating emotionally include:
- Using Food as a Reward: If you have a habit of downing a chocolate shake from your favorite drive-thru after a hard day at work, you finally put a task you’ve been dreading to bed or are feeling depressed over a disagreement with your best friend, it may be a sign that you’re eating emotionally.
- Feeding Stressors: You might be eating your feelings if, instead of figuring out why you feel empty, isolated, bored, worried, or angry, you bury those emotions by downing a donut or a candy bar.
- Hidden Eating: If you find yourself shoving your latest collection of candy wrappers in the garbage, consuming unhealthy foods in larger amounts when you’re alone than if you were with others or wolfing down snack foods in unusual places such as the laundry room or storage area of your home, you may be experiencing emotional eating.
- Out of Control: You might be eating emotionally if you can’t put the brakes on when it comes to food or find yourself absently reaching for a salty snack when sadness, isolation, or even relief threatens your emotional equilibrium.
Is Emotional Eating Linked to Eating Disorders?
While most of us turn to food occasionally to deal with stress, it’s when we begin to use it as our primary coping mechanism, or our eating patterns morph into a frequent compulsion and get beyond our control, that we slip into disordered territory. An eating disorder can manifest in several ways:
Binge Eating Disorder (BED)
Binge Eating Disorder (BED) is a compulsive cycle, characterized by consuming large amounts of food within a short period of time. This is followed by feelings of overwhelming shame and a need to keep the destructive habit secret at all costs.
Bulimia Nervosa
Bulimia Nervosa happens when we try to bury or numb our negative feelings by overeating, and the resulting weight gain leads to a cycle of purging behaviors such as self-induced vomiting, too many hours at the gym, or laxative abuse as a way of taking the extra pounds off.
Anorexia Nervosa
Anorexia Nervosa occurs when tamping down our negative emotions causes us to restrict our food intake instead of increasing it. Fueled by a need for perfection and control in a world where everything feels anything but, restricting what we put in our mouths becomes a way to mask our feelings and find a haven amid the chaos.
If you find yourself experiencing any of these symptoms or your eating habits have become chronic and out of control, it’s probably time for you to seek professional help.
Healthy Alternatives to Emotional Eating
If we eat emotionally because we’re not processing our feelings productively, the key to replacing overindulgence is engaging in activities that act as a release valve for what we feel, whether positive or negative.
Tackle Your Emotions Head On
Perhaps the most logical way to successfully curb our emotional eating habits is to think about strategies to deal with each feeling as it comes along.
- Take a stroll, go to your happy place, or engage in a few cleansing breaths when you feel yourself getting stressed out.
- Text, Zoom, or visit a friend you haven’t seen in a while when you’re feeling alone.
- Watch an episode of your favorite sitcom or make a list of all the things you have to be thankful for if you’re feeling sad.
- Don’t wait for someone else to keep you from feeling bored. Take matters into your own hands and start that craft or building project you’ve been thinking about doing forever.
Indulge Your Senses
Let’s face it, food is an immersive, sensual experience. That means whatever we replace it with should let us indulge a wide variety of senses. For example, a walk in the park can be a feast for the eyes, ears, and nose. Remember, food isn’t the only way to spark our minds and our senses.
How to Heal Your Relationship With Food
Since food not only fuels our bodies and minds but also anchors unforgettable moments with those we cherish, it’s vital to learn new ways to cope with the feelings that can trigger emotional eating. These skills aren’t a one-time fix; use them whenever negative feelings surface, and you’re tempted to numb them with food.
- Accept your need for food: Listen to what your body says about hunger, fullness, and cravings, and notice how food tastes and smells as it hits your tongue. Stop labeling certain foods and your appetite for them as good or bad.
- Experience your emotions: Feeling anxious about the future, sad over loss, or lonely because you miss a loved one is part of the natural process of living and isn’t meant to be ignored or submerged. Even though some emotions are easier to deal with than others, they’re not “good” or “bad”; they just are. Try to identify the triggers that make you want to grab a snack when you’re not actually hungry, then hit pause by listening to your favorite playlist or reaching out to a friend.
- Let go of guilt: Refuse to feel guilty because you have a negative emotion. Feelings signal when something is out of whack with your values, and dismissing them out of guilt invalidates their existence. Recognize guilt when it appears. Remember, experiencing your feelings allows them to dissipate with time.
- Act as if: Picturing the way you’d like to relate to food is the first step toward changing your reaction to it. Think about what’s keeping you from reaching your ideal relationship to what you eat, then figure out which of those things are under your control and act accordingly.
- Jettison Stressors: Take inventory of the things that cause you anxiety and then list what you can do to combat them. Start a new hobby, get some exercise, or invite a friend to dinner when you feel stress begin to build. This strategy will help you feel better about yourself and your situation.
- Rethink your mistakes: Learning to see missteps as opportunities for growth and change can go a long way toward reducing guilt that can trigger emotional eating, and discussing your mistakes with a friend can remind you that making them is a normal part of being human.
- Talk to an expert: One of the best ways to normalize our emotions and improve our relationship with food is to seek advice from those who can help. A skilled therapist can give us the tools we need to accept ourselves and process our emotions in a healthy way; just as a nutritionist can help us understand the connection between how we think about the food we eat and how we react to it.
Finding Professional Support for Emotional Eating
When we eat to tamp down emotions, either positive or negative, we can sometimes find ourselves in a skewed relationship with our feelings and the foods we eat—a circumstance that can lead to emotional eating and, in extreme cases, an eating disorder. Fortunately, we have tools to improve our relationship with food and lead to healthier outcomes. If we make peace with the fact that food is fuel, experience our emotions and need for food in a guilt-free way, visualize a positive relationship with what we eat, let go of stress, and reframe mistakes as opportunities, we’ll be more likely to maintain a healthy balance between our emotions and what we put in our bodies.
References
Marson, Gia, Ed.D. Keenan-Miller, Danielle, Ph.D., (2023, January 24). Emotional Eating Is All About Emotions, or Is It? Psychologytoday.com. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-binge-eating-prevention-plan/202301/emotional-eating-is-all-about-emotions-or-is-it
Scaringi, Vanessa, Ph.D., CEDS-C., (2024, November 19). Understanding Emotional Eating. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/body-acceptance/202411/understanding-emotional-eating
Charles Davis is an essayist who has written for a variety of academic publications, The Gay & Lesbian Review and The Christian Science Monitor. Mr. Davis also writes a blog on navigating loss and building a new life at: https://gayandgrieving.blog. He was a semifinalist for the 2023 Mason Jar Press 1729 Book Prize in Prose.