Overeating isn’t your fault
Emotional, boredom, stress eating or mindless snacking can be a source of frustration and guilt for many people. It can be especially frustrating when you know how to be healthy, but you just can’t seem to make yourself do it. You might notice that negative inner voice starts to creep in every time you find yourself popping back to the pantry for another handful of chips, or overindulging in that late night block of chocolate.
However, it's important to understand that these behaviours are not entirely your fault. Yes, eating is a conscious choice that we make, however the conscious awareness of over-eating can be overridden by the impulsivity and reactivity of our ‘survival brain’. This makes the emotional overeating or mindless snacking feel ‘automatic’, or like it’s happening before you know it. You might even feel out of control with food, like once you start eating you can’t stop.
There are other various underlying factors that contribute to overeating and mindless snacking, and learning to address these factors can help you regain control over your eating habits and your health.
Lack of Awareness
Sometimes we eat mindlessly simply because we're not aware of or paying attention to the reasons we are choosing to eat, or because we are eating whilst distracted with other things.
Food, and particularly too much of it, actually cuts off our awareness. So emotional eating (eating in the absence of biological hunger) is a way we subconsciously, but also deliberately, cut off our awareness so that momentarily we don’t have to deal with our current problems, or feel the discomfort of our thoughts or emotions. As they say, ignorance is bliss. Until it’s not, and then you realise your overeating patterns are affecting your health and making you feel bad about your body.
And in our fast-paced lives, stress leads us to function unconsciously throughout the day, which includes eating on ‘autopilot’. Watching TV, scrolling social media or working on your computer means we are not present whilst eating, which can lead to eating past fullness or beyond our body’s satisfaction.
So, it’s not your fault. Now it’s just being willing to slow down, become more present, get to know your body's cues and cultivate more awareness in order to break free from these eating patterns.
Biological Factors
Our bodies are wired to seek food, especially high-fat and high-sugar options as a survival mechanism under certain conditions. This means that you may naturally have food cravings and urges to eat, even when you're not genuinely physically hungry. This may happen when you are stressed, or in ‘survival mode’.
When you are racing around trying to achieve a million things in one day, your survival brain perceives your life is in danger (even if you feel happy at the time) and releases stress hormones into the body. You might know this as the ‘fight or flight’ response, which is designed by nature to help us flee from a dangerous scene or fight against threats in order to maintain our survival. This ‘survival mode’ is likely also causing your impulses or urges to overeat, because we need food to survive. So it’s not your fault you are so driven towards food, especially when you are anxious or stressed. It’s just a biological compensatory mechanism to keep you alive and safe, that we can manage and help you break free.
Emotional Eating
Emotional factors often play a significant role in overeating and mindless snacking. Stress, boredom, sadness, and even happiness can trigger a desire to eat. The dopamine reward system in the brain also provides a pleasure hit that makes us feel happy and relaxed when we eat high sugar, high fat and salty foods. Therefore it is fairly appealing to reach for these foods when we are feeling sad or depressed. It’s instant gratification, and instant ‘quick fix, although fleeting. So emotional eating is not your fault, and there is nothing wrong with you. It's just that eating pleasurable food is a very easy way to instantly soothe stress or emotions and to feel a sense of pleasure again.
So emotional eating is not your fault, and there is nothing wrong with you. It's just that eating pleasurable food is a very easy way to instantly soothe stress or emotions and to feel a sense of pleasure again.
Habit
Using food to soothe ourselves is a very natural, human thing to do. It is also a conditioned response from when we were born - when we cried our mother fed us milk. Not only did this satisfy our physical hunger, but the emotional connection with our mother that created a feeling of safety and comfort.
Now when you create an emotional association with certain foods in certain situations ie. chocolate after dinner every night as a reward for getting through a hard day, birthday cake at a party, tub of ice cream after a breakup, or beer and fish and chips on a Friday night - the emotional association and pleasure reward we get from these highly palatable foods motivates us to want to eat it again. When we repeat this over and over again we accidentally create an automatic habit that gets wired into the brain. So your eating can be happening on autopilot before you even realise it. Furthermore, the more you repeat this habit your dopamine receptors become desenstised, so you need more of the same food to get the same pleasure ‘hit’. This is what leads to over-eating on a regular basis.
So, we need to break the ‘habit’ or neural pathway in the brain supporting this behaviour, so that it’s no longer automatic. Without directly addressing this ingrained ‘habit’, and also the emotional component of the habit, all dieting attempts will eventually lead back to emotional overeating, no matter how much willpower you have.
Environmental Triggers
Our environment is full of cues that encourage eating. The smell of freshly baked cookies, the sight of a TV commercial or billboard with your favorite snack, or simply having food readily available can lead to mindless snacking. These environmental triggers are not your fault; just very clever strategies designed to make you eat, or influence your food choices and expenditure.
Learning what your unique eating triggers are is the first step to healing your relationship with food and breaking these overeating patterns.
Diet Culture Conditioning
Living in a culture that promotes dieting, body perfection, and "good" and "bad" foods can create a constant cycle of restriction and indulgence. The guilt associated with enjoying deemed forbidden foods or even slightly breaking the ‘perfect’ diet plan can lead to overeating or bingeing. Somewhere along the way diet plans became the absolving ritual to relieve you of the guilt of being ‘bad’. But are also a seduction trap, giving you the illusion of being in control with life again. This harsh deprivation of food however does not suddenly solve all of your life’s problems, and only leads to more overeating on all the foods you've been restricting. Once again you feel like a failure, powerless, and trapped in the ‘all or nothing’ cycle again.
