One of the biggest things that causes people to struggle with their health goals is emotional eating. This idea is that poor eating habits are triggered by negative emotions or stress. Most people try to stop emotional eating with willpower. That never works, and on a fundamental level, it cannot work. Food and willpower are not the issues; they are distractions from the issue. In this blog, I want to share some of the reasons we emotionally eat and what we actually need in order to stop the cycle before it starts.
If we take a step back, we have to give ourselves credit that emotional eating actually makes a lot of sense as a strategy to help ourselves feel better. Eating high-calorie food releases endorphins connected to pleasure, and this can be strong enough to override difficult feelings we are having. If we think about the history of humanity, famines and starvation have been a constant threat. From a survival standpoint, it is helpful if our brain makes us feel good when we eat high-calorie food. Humanity wouldn’t have survived for long if we only felt good eating low-calorie things. If that were the case, we would never have gained physical strength to survive or built up fat stores to get us through hard times.
When we are stressed, cortisol is released, and this can also increase our hunger. Back in human history, another one of the biggest threats was physical harm. Eating rapidly can be a natural urge when we are stressed because that extra energy from food could be needed to help you think more clearly, win a fight, or run fast and far enough to save your life. These days, the feeling of threat may come because you had a difficult meeting with your boss, but your body still interprets threats the same way, causing an urge to eat.
At the root, emotional eating is a strategy to distract ourselves from uncomfortable emotions that we don’t have the confidence to resolve. It can feel stressful and overwhelming not to know how to resolve uncomfortable emotions. Eating is also a helpful strategy to get our minds off that stress. Why? Because at least we know how to resolve overeating. It is a relief to know how to solve a problem, so if we create a problem with food and decide to resolve it by another trip to the gym, we don’t feel as helpless.
We can also be driven to eat as a way of expressing and confirming how we feel. If we feel out of control, the way we treat food may mirror that feeling. If someone is upset with themself, the way they eat may be a physical manifestation of that feeling. Like charades or a pantomime, our emotions want to be understood and resolved. They may resort to symbolic ways of showing us what they are experiencing through our behavior and actions around food.
Finally, we might emotionally eat certain foods to remind ourselves of good memories. When we feel we can’t resolve our uncomfortable emotions, we know we can go get our favorite dessert. This reminds us of special occasions and thinking about that memory can minimize our uncomfortable feelings for a while.
While eating is a good strategy to help distract us from uncomfortable emotions, it will never actually resolve our emotions. Every uncomfortable and unpleasant emotion is meant to be resolved. The purpose of emotions is to communicate vital information about what you need to live your best life. But, if they don’t trust you got their message, they will keep sending it over and over until it is resolved. By covering up the message with food, we only ensure we stay stuck in a pattern that is not helping us. To stop emotional eating, we have to develop the skill of interpreting, understanding, and resolving emotions.
This skill, like any other, doesn’t develop overnight. If you notice you engage in emotional eating, there are strategies you can use to give yourself space and a chance to resolve the actual issue. Some of these are in the way you set up your environment, the things you buy, and the way you train your thinking and self-talk. I talk much more about these strategies as well as how to resolve emotions in my Health Coaching program.
The good news is that when we master the ability to resolve uncomfortable emotions, we resolve the root issue, and we won’t need emotional eating or anything else to distract us. Our emotional eating will naturally no longer serve a purpose or be needed as a strategy that helps our life.