How to Tell If You’re Engaging in Emotional Eating

How do you know if you’re doing too much of a thing? One possibility is in what the apostle wrote: “‘I have the right to do anything,’ you say – but not everything is beneficial. ‘I have the right to do anything’ – but I will not be mastered by anything.” (1 Corinthians 6:12-13, NIV). Not everything we can do is beneficial to us, and even when we have the right to do something, when that thing becomes our master instead of our servant, something needs to change.

There’s a sense in which we live at an amazing time when it comes to food. You can drive to a grocery store and get spices, fruit, grains, drinks, vegetables, and proteins from across the world, something that people set sail on long voyages for in previous centuries. There’s a glut of cooking shows, tutorials, and masterclasses available to motivate and help you prepare tasty food.

All this notwithstanding, our relationship with food can be complex and messy. Food is often a major area of inequality, as some are calorie-deficient while others have a surplus. Food can also play a role that goes beyond sustenance. It can become a source of comfort and a way to deal with difficult emotions and situations. Emotional eating is a struggle that many have, and it can be quite damaging to your well-being.

The Deep Connection Between Food and Our Feelings

Food isn’t something that just sustains our bodies. We form bonds of fellowship over meals or drinks, and these relationships can last a lifetime. For many, some of their fondest memories are connected with food in one way or another. It could be a gathering like Thanksgiving dinner, a first date, cherished childhood memories at a particular sweet or dessert place, and so on. Food and happy moments often have close associations.

Food doesn’t just connect with our feelings in this way. There are certain foods, especially the fatty, sweet, crispy, and crunchy kind, that also affect our body’s reward system, triggering the release of dopamine, which can create a cycle of craving and consumption. We crave more of these types of food that we find pleasurable, and we can end up overeating.

We may turn to food to find happiness, or to deal with hard seasons in our lives. In a sense, it’s an attempt to recapture the delight that food created in certain moments, and it’s also a way to trigger happy thoughts and feelings when we’re in a bad way.

Emotional Eating: What is it?

We eat for a variety of reasons. We eat because we get hungry, and that’s how our bodies replenish their fuel and give us what we need to work, play, think, and do life. We can eat socially, not just out of hunger, but to connect with others over a meal. We eat for pleasure, to experience sensations, flavors, textures, and to connect with where we are. Thus, we sometimes eat as part of experiencing the place we’re vacationing in or visiting.

In the middle of all this, we also eat in ways that could be classified as emotional eating. Emotional eating is when we eat, not to satisfy hunger or casually as part of connecting with a place or with others, but in response to emotional distress.

Emotional eating is a coping mechanism, a way to deal with hard or unpleasant situations and emotions. Often, the go-to foods that are featured are those high in fat, carbohydrates, or those high in sugar content.

Emotional eating is a way to get temporary relief or to distract yourself from emotions or situations that are less than ideal. A person might turn to emotional eating to address the feelings that come up because of financial concerns, relationship issues, trauma, loss, work-related stressors, or when significant life changes like divorce, separation, job loss, or moving house occur.

These experiences are hard to deal with. They raise complex thoughts and emotions that aren’t pleasant to sit with. Emotional eating is one way that a person can try to cope with these emotions, but it’s not a healthy or effective coping mechanism in the long run.

Why People Engage in Emotional Eating

If emotional eating is damaging and not an effective coping strategy in the long term, why do people engage in it? We can use food to suppress, distract, or soothe uncomfortable and unwelcome feelings. Eating can temporarily lift your mood, and that small sense of comfort can fuel emotional eating when you’re feeling sad or just down.

When you’re feeling stressed or facing a high-pressure situation, your body releases cortisol, the stress hormone. This can trigger cravings for certain foods. If you’re feeling bored, listless, empty, or like you’re lacking purpose, filling the time with eating can be an activity that helps to escape that sense of emptiness.

For others, when they are lonely, food can function like a temporary companion that carries a sense of warmth or familiarity with it. Certain foods really do feel comforting, and that’s why we turn to them, or have favorites that we’ve experienced as dependable ways to feel better when we’re not doing so hot.

Lastly, life can feel overwhelming, looming large and entirely unpredictable. This could be concerning your work, a relationship, your living or financial situation, or anything else that feels like it’s beyond your ability to manage. Eating food can function as a way to provide yourself with a sense of control when everything else around you feels too big to manage. It can help you, temporarily, to manage feelings of anxiety.

How Emotional Eating Impacts You

Emotional eating is such an attractive way to deal with issues because it gives you a quick hit of comfort, of pleasure, and even of security. Therein lies one of the problems with it. Emotional eating can give you comfort, but it is short-lived, fleeting. In the long term, there are many negative consequences of it.

Some of the ways emotional eating affects you over the long haul include how it negatively affects your mental health. Often, emotional eating can leave you with feelings of shame, the knowledge that you lost control, and guilt that can accompany overindulging. Physically, it can result in unplanned weight gain, increased risks of issues such as diabetes or cardiac disease, as well as digestive issues.

Eating affects your body, not only in how it functions, but how it feels, especially if you aren’t giving your body what it needs. The weight fluctuations resulting from emotional eating can result in a negative body image, and they can impact self-esteem as well.

Are you engaging in emotional eating?

It’s important, then, to ask yourself if you’re engaging in emotional eating. Some of the signs that you can look out for include the following:

Recourse to food when in distress If you turn to food for comfort when you experience distress, that could point to emotional eating. If your eating habits change when you’re experiencing stress or other challenges in your life, that could be a sign of emotional eating.

Eating more than planned Emotional eating may also be indicated by overindulging, eating beyond what you need to, because it feels good. When you eat even when you’re already full or when you’re not hungry, it could be because it’s emotional eating. If you get out of control around certain foods, that could also suggest that you’re an emotional eater.

Feelings of guilt If you have feelings of guilt around what you’ve eaten or how much of it you’ve consumed, and if you also go to the lengths of hiding what you’re eating from your loved ones, that could be a sign of emotional eating.

Eating to avoid Emotional eating could be at play if you use food to avoid dealing with a stressful or challenging situation.

Tying food to a reward If food functions as a reward or you feel like food calms you, that could be a sign that you’re an emotional eater.

Addressing Emotional Eating Effectively

If you eat to soothe your emotions or to avoid dealing with difficult situations, there are ways to stop leaning on this coping mechanism. Being emotionally aware by tracking your moods and eating patterns is a step in that direction. You need to be armed with knowledge, including knowledge of your triggers or the emotional cues that prompt emotional eating. This helps you to be better prepared in those moments.

It is also helpful for you to take on healthy coping mechanisms that promote your well-being. Exercise, whatever shape that takes for you, can help relieve stress effectively. Exercise elevates your mood, too, which is an added benefit. Additionally, you can also practice mindful eating, which can help you differentiate between emotional and physical hunger. Mindful eating can help improve your relationship with your food.

Lastly, you can also seek support in the form of counseling, which can help to identify and address any underlying emotional issues that might fuel your eating habits. Counseling is a non-judgmental space where you can be understood, and where you can learn how to nurture a healthy relationship with yourself and with your food.

Contact our office today to speak with a counselor to find out how they can help you address emotional eating.