Understanding and Managing Emotional Eating

Are you someone who eats for comfort or to cope with stress? You can resist cravings, find more fulfilling ways to satisfy your feelings, and eliminate emotional eating and stress eating with the help of these strategies. But first, let's understand what is emotional eating and why it happens. 

What is Emotional Eating?

Sometimes, most of us don’t always eat to satisfy our physical hunger. A lot of people frequently use food as a way to comfort, decompress, or reward themselves. And when we do that, we tend to reach for junk foods, sweets, and other comforting but not-so-healthy foods.

This is exactly what Emotional Eating means, using food as a means to make ourselves feel better- to fill our emotional needs rather than our stomach’s physical hunger. Unfortunately, emotional eating doesn’t fix emotional problems. In fact, it often leads to feelings of guilt and worsens emotional distress. Understanding the effects of emotional eating is crucial to breaking this cycle.

 

The Emotional Eating Cycle

Occasionally, using food as a mood uplifter, a reward, or to celebrate isn’t necessarily bad. However, when eating becomes a key coping method, such as opening the refrigerator whenever you are anxious, overwhelmed, angry, disturbed, weary, or bored, you become trapped in a viciously unhealthy cycle in which the underlying emotional problem is never addressed.

Since stress eating is one of the most common triggers, identifying stress-related food cravings is essential. How to stop emotional eating starts with recognizing that food cannot truly satisfy emotional hunger. Over time, this habit can lead to unhealthy weight gain, low self-esteem, and difficulty managing emotions.

To make matters worse, you lose track of healthy coping mechanisms for your emotions, finding it more difficult to maintain a healthy weight and growing more and more helpless in the face of food and your emotions. But you can make a change for the better, despite how helpless you feel about food and emotions. You can get better over time at controlling your emotions, avoiding triggers, stifling your incessant food desires, and eventually quitting emotional eating.

Difference between Emotional and Physical Hunger

You must first understand the difference between physical and emotional hunger to escape the cycle of emotional eating.

 

 

Emotional Eating Triggers

Recognizing your triggers is the first step in how to stop emotional eating. Among the most typical reasons why people overeat emotionally are:

1. Stress
   Chronic stress due to our hectic lifestyle leads to higher levels of stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol increases cravings for salty, sweet, and fried food- foods that will give you a sudden burst of energy and pleasure. This response often leads to stress eating, where people use food as a temporary relief from overwhelming emotions.
   
   
2. Stuffing Emotions
   Eating can become a temporary strategy to suppress unpleasant emotions like grief, anger, fear, worry, loneliness, and so on.
   
   
3. Boredom
   Many people at times use food to relieve boredom or simply want to fill the void in their lives. Eating turns into a means of passing the time and keeping your mouth full. It satisfies you momentarily and diverts your attention from underlying unhappiness in your life. However, identifying alternatives to emotional eating, such as engaging in hobbies or physical activities, can help break this cycle.
   
   
4. Food as a Reward
   Most of the time, in childhood, parents reward their children with food as a means of celebrating the smallest milestones achieved. This habit continues even into adulthood, resulting in using food as a reward for every happiness.
   
   
5. Social Influences
   While sharing a meal with others is a wonderful way to decompress, it may often result in overindulgence. Just because food is available or others are eating makes it simple to overindulge. Overeating in social situations can also be caused by anxiety.

 

Find Alternatives to Emotional Eating

You won't be able to regulate your eating habits for very long if you don't know how to deal with your emotions without turning to food. Diets often fail because they provide logical nutritional advice that only works if you have conscious control over your eating habits.
If you want to know how to stop emotional eating, the key is to develop alternative ways to cope with emotions that don’t involve food:

• If you're feeling down or lonely, give a friend or family member a call, play with your pet, or gaze at a treasured picture.
  
  
• Squeeze a stress ball, go for a vigorous walk, or dance to your favorite music to release tension if you're feeling nervous.
   
• Indulge in a hot cup of tea, take a bath, listen to some feel-good music, light some fragrant candles, or curl up in a warm blanket if you're feeling worn out.
  
  
• Read a nice book, see a comedy show, go outside, or engage in a fun hobby (such as playing the guitar, any sport, sketching, etc.) if you're bored.
  
  
  

Indulge Without Overeating by Savoring your Food

One of the best ways to combat stress eating is by practicing mindful eating. Eating to satisfy your emotions usually results in rapid, mindless eating that happens automatically. You eat so quickly that you lose track of the various flavors and textures of your meal as well as your body's signals that it is full and that you are no longer hungry. However, you'll not only appreciate your food more and be less prone to overeat if you take your time and chew and savor every bite.

You'll discover that you appreciate every piece of food much more when you slow down in this way. You can even eat your favorite dishes and feel satisfied with considerably fewer meal portions. Since it takes time for your brain to receive the body's fullness signal, it can be beneficial to pause and reflect on your feelings after each mouthful to help you prevent overindulging.