Emotional Eating

Preventing and Treating Emotional Eating

January 28, 2010
By Paul Hynes

Emotional eating is defined as the use of food as a means of dealing with complex emotions that you are feeling, regardless of whether they are positive and negative emotions. This is one of the leading causes of obesity and overeating in North America. Learning your triggers for emotional eating is the first step to treating your problem.

Emotional problems such as feeling stressed, bored, lonely, or angry can be triggers for overeating. This stems from the usual high content of sugar and carbohydrates in typical “comfort food”. This pushes the levels of serotonin up and creates “happy feelings” in the brain. Serotonin is a chemical compound released by the brain which stabilizes moods, calms anxiety, and relieves depression. The cycle of eating to make ourselves feel better can become addictive and then emotional eating becomes an eating disorder.

An important process to identifying these triggers is to keep a food journal. In it, you will write everything you eat and how you felt emotionally before, during, and after. This will force you to look at your eating habits to see where and why problems are arising. Once you’ve identified what triggers affect you the most, you can put together a plan to change your habits.

To change your bad habits, you must learn to associate your current triggers with a completely different behavior. For example, if you consistently eat due to boredom, try picking up a new hobby such as playing the guitar or knitting to keep your hands busy and your attention somewhere else. If stress is a big trigger for you, try another means of stress relief such as yoga and deep breathing. Someone who often eats when they are alone should avoid having unhealthy foods in the house so that it requires you to go out in public to purchase these foods. You will more than likely be able to bypass the craving if you have to go out of your way for something.

Emotional eating can disrupt your efforts at weight loss due to the strong nature of cravings. Teaching yourself how to soothe your negative emotions by implementing positive habits are helpful, as are learning how to differentiate between hunger and emotional issues. Let yourself indulge once in a while but try to keep only healthy foods for your snacks.

Paul likes to write on various topics and has been doing so for several years. His latest website is http://bestbabybottles.org which provides people with information on the best baby bottles.

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