Understanding emotional overeating
Emotional eating is a deeply ingrained behaviour that most of us do from time to time, and can develop into a habit. It can be hard to understand, because it is emotional, as opposed to logical.
This article will help you learn about emotional eating, understand the difference between emotional eating and emotional overeating, where it comes from, why you do it, and some practical ways to break free.
Firstly, emotional eating is defined as eating in the absence of biological hunger.
It's simply eating for any other reason other than being physically hungry. This includes boredom eating. So you don't have to be falling apart or an emotional mess to be an emotional eater. You can even emotionally eat when you are happy in order to celebrate!
And secondly, emotional eating is not your fault. It may also be the only way you have learnt to soothe your stress and emotions, which is a very normal and natural thing to do. In fact, we have been conditioned that way since infancy.
Think about when you were hungry and needed love as a newborn baby - you cried, your mother picked you up and comforted you, and put you on the breast to drink milk. The milk satisfied your hunger, calmed you down and made you feel safe. You have been fed, therefore on a deeper level your survival was no longer threatened. You are safe. The nurturing connection with your mother also causes the release of hormones like oxytocin to provide feelings of love, belongingness, stability and emotional safety. This is when food begins to mean ‘safety’ and ‘survival’ for many people.
Therefore every time you feel stressed, unsafe, or emotionally unstable you may turn to food for comfort. So, you can only imagine if you are living in a constant state of high stress due to past trauma or the pressures of daily life, it is easy to begin emotionally overeating on a regular basis to try and cope. This is why it’s easy for emotional overeating to develop into an ingrained habit and therefore begin affecting your mental and physical health.
We all emotionally eat, as this includes snacking on chips watching TV, grabbing an ice cream after lunch on a holiday for something to do, enjoying a piece of birthday cake at a party or some dessert after dinner, even when you've just eaten. Biologically our body may not require it, but we are choosing to eat it to experience the pleasure of it.
This is all part of ‘normal’ eating, because food is designed to be pleasurable and to be enjoyed for the purposes of our survival. Food is not just for nutrition or health. It is absolutely normal to emotionally overeat sometimes, but food was not meant to be abused, nor eaten with guilt or shame.
In my professional opinion it's only when we emotionally overeat on a regular basis, or rely on food as our only way to soothe stress and emotions, then it becomes a habit, that it may become detrimental to our wellbeing and need to be addressed.
Government studies also now prove that emotional overeating is also the cause of about 83% of overweight..
This means that we are eating more food than what our body requires, as we are not physically hungry, so it gets stored in our adipose tissue. So addressing the underlying root cause of emotional overeating, rather than on weight loss itself is really the only way to combat this.
The Main Culprits Of Emotional Overeating
Body dissatisfaction, self-judgement, yo-yo dieting, food deprivation, control, past trauma, high stress, low self-esteem, and mental health issues like anxiety and depression are just some of the triggers to emotional overeating.
Furthermore, emotional overeating is a way to subconsciously cut off your awareness. So if you find yourself being impulsive around food, eating for comfort when you feel sad, lonely, angry or frustrated, it's likely you don’t want to truly feel these emotions because they are too uncomfortable. Therefore it’s easier just to eat some yummy comfort food to receive an instant pleasure hit, rather than deal with thoughts and feelings head on. This is why emotional eating can easily develop from childhood if no other ways to manage stress and emotions have been learnt yet.
Studies prove that body dissatisfaction causes disordered eating..
And in my experience as a food freedom coach this has definitely been confirmed with my clients. I’ve found that emotional eating habits are almost impossible to break if you are feeling bad about your body after looking in the mirror or jumping on the scales. This is a huge trigger for more comfort eating or ‘punishment eating’.
Dieting and depriving ourselves of comforting foods we enjoy can also end up backfiring into more overeating on these foods, than if they were allowed in the first place, in the effort to feel comfort again. This is why strict diets don’t work, because they may trigger a feeling of being ‘unsafe’, away from all the ‘bad’ foods you may also perceive as safety and comfort.
Other many reasons you may emotionally eat..
We emotionally eat to avoid doing a difficult or uncomfortable task, to procrastinate or take a break from whilst studying or working, avoid emotional or physical pain, rebel against the control of others or against government or dieting rules, to escape the relentlessness of work or home pressures, to reward yourself at the end of a busy day or doing something well, or to escape the family and create a feeling of ‘my time’, once kids have gone to bed.
All of these reasons are really just avoidance of self. Avoidance of what is. An unwillingness to be present in the moment with how you feel or what current situation you feel trapped in. You may have already noticed that emotional eating unfortunately only provides a fleeting break from your reality, and emotional ‘overeating’ may in fact leave you feeling a lot worse, mentally and physically, with the original feelings or situations still there to deal with, in addition to the inflammation and body hatred you may now be feeling.
So how do we break free for good? We need to address the root cause.
Merely adopting another food plan won’t address the root cause of your emotional eating. Most of you already know how to eat healthy, so another food plan will simply create more rules, restriction and deprivation, only backfiring into more emotional overeating sooner or later.
More willpower or discipline will only last for so long, because the automatic habit of soothing yourself with food is still there. It’s the ingrained habit in the brain that needs to be addressed, and this can be achieved for most by following two simple steps in the Body Love Lifestyle coaching program.
Breaking free from emotional overeating requires a holistic and multi-layered approach…
This involves the practicals such as good nutrition, as well as deeper healing, and adopting the intuitive eating principles. To break this habit for good, the right professional support is needed to lovingly support you through a specific step-by-step process of addressing the root causes - the emotions and habit.
Here coaching clients at Body Love Lifestyle I have seen first hand that laying down the right foundations first by beginning with body acceptance and self acknowledgement is the only way to successfully break the cycle.
When you learn how to accept where your body is at right now and how to love yourself a little bit more, there is less need to reach for external pleasure hits, or to seek comfort through high dopamine foods. Therefore you break the emotional habit easier, because you are happier, and you actually want to take care of yourself more. Then loving yourself into a healthy body via new healthy habits becomes easy. This is the only thing that sticks long term.
