What Is Emotional Eating, and How Can You Stop It?
It's well known that when common emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, joy, and anxiety are expected to last a long time, or when they actually do last a long time, changes in eating behavior tend to occur. All of these emotions, regardless of the direction of the effect, can noticeably change our eating speed, food choices, chewing speed, the amount we eat, and our desire to eat. The change that occurs in a person's appetite due to emotional stress is not the same for everyone. Most studies show that the proportion of people whose appetite increases after emotional stress is smaller than the proportion whose appetite decreases. When we look at the averages from these studies, it's been found that almost four out of every five people experience a change in appetite after emotional stress: 30 out of every 100 people have an increased appetite, while 48 have a decreased appetite. In this article, we'll focus on the increase in eating behavior following emotional stress—in other words, "emotional eating"—which affects an average of 30 out of every 100 people, and we'll offer some ideas on how to cope with it.
We often see that many people who struggle with emotional eating also struggle to lose weight, or to keep off the weight they've lost. Behaviors like eating late at night, eating when happy, or eating when feeling bad can, depending on the context and situation, be considered uncontrolled or dysfunctional eating behaviors. We particularly observe that, for many people, food eaten during emotional stress becomes a problem. On the other hand, if late-night meals or meals eaten while happy aren't perceived as positive or beneficial, they can trigger emotional stress along with feelings of guilt. In controlling eating behavior, it's important to understand emotional eating and to learn how to cope with it.
Emotional eating is seen as a way of suppressing intense emotions, or of shifting—even briefly—toward a more positive feeling. It's debated whether emotional eating can serve several different functions. It could be said to serve functions such as covering up stress, trying to reduce the intensity of negative emotions, and escaping self-awareness. Emotional eating tends to appear when a person is experiencing challenging emotions such as anger, anxiety, stress, sadness, uncertainty, or hopelessness. It wouldn't be wrong to say that eating carried out in order to regulate emotions is generally dysfunctional. This is because emotional eating can lead to weight-related or health-related problems. On the other hand, the fact that the sense of relief that arises during and after eating is temporary, and that it gets in the way of any attempt to solve the problem or accept the emotion, is another reason this behavior is considered dysfunctional. It should also be noted that, in some cases, consuming certain mood-boosting foods (a few pieces of chocolate, for example) isn't considered dysfunctional as long as it stays under control. What we mean by dysfunctional here is that the eating behavior does the person more harm than good.
So how can emotional eating be prevented?
• First, it's important to be able to tell the difference between emotional hunger and real hunger. Real hunger builds up gradually, while emotional hunger appears suddenly. With real hunger, any kind of food can seem satisfying, but with emotional hunger, there's usually a stronger craving for specific food groups. With real hunger, a feeling of fullness comes after eating a certain amount, whereas with emotional hunger, reaching a feeling of fullness is harder. Finally, feeling guilty isn't typical after eating due to real hunger, but guilt is commonly felt after emotional eating. We can use this information to help understand in which situations emotional eating tends to appear.
• Emotional eating is usually done in the hope that it will make us feel better. However, it's known that emotional eating creates restlessness and negative emotion, or intensifies these emotions even further. This is a piece of information worth remembering whenever you feel a desire to eat outside of a state of physical hunger.
• Keeping a food journal is an important practice for stopping emotional eating. Much like reporting to a dietitian, you can write down, over the course of a few weeks, when you ate, which food, and how much of it, and note how you felt before and after these meals, whether something affected you, or whether you were stressed. This will help you recognize your eating patterns and make it easier to understand in which situations emotional eating tends to appear.
• It's essential to find different activities to help cope with distress and stress. When the urge to eat emotionally arises, going outside, taking a five- to ten-minute walk, talking to someone you feel close to, praying, or listening to music to shift your focus are all activities you can try until the urge to eat subsides. As mentioned earlier, the critical thing here is to be able to tell whether the urge to eat stems from physical hunger or psychological hunger. Once you recognize it's psychological hunger, you can turn to these methods, or to other techniques that work well for you personally. The urge for emotional eating usually isn't constant. So being able to resist the urge to eat for a short while can help you get back to your daily routine.
• We know that emotional eating usually follows negative emotions. So what are the situations that cause these negative emotions to arise? Have you hit a dead end in a relationship, are you experiencing uncertainty, are you about to make an important career decision, or are you facing a difficult situation you can't control? Recognizing the problem and, if possible, addressing it—or, if that's not possible, going through the process of accepting it—can help you control your eating behaviour.
If we're prone to eating more than we need to whenever we feel stressed, anxious, sad, or another challenging emotion, we can conclude that we need to regulate our emotions, but that we don't have access to functional emotion regulation methods we could use for that purpose. At this point, learning more functional emotion regulation methods would be a major gain. Certain psychological difficulties and personality traits can create fertile ground for greater emotion regulation struggles. For this reason, making changes to one's lifestyle and emotion regulation methods isn't easy for everyone. For readers who fit this description, the best course of action would be to consult a professional and get support.
Psychologist Malik Kubilay ÇADIRCIOĞLU
