How To Heal Emotional Eating
Emotional Eating is one tough subject, as is how to heal emotional eating.
It’s tough because writing this Blog I want to make sure that it is nuanced and careful enough to show empathy with what you are struggling with and show you the action steps to try and help you move forward.
It’s tough as well, because of how much you are suffering with it, and the difficult work that you will likely have to do to unpick your emotional eating behaviours in order to rebuild your relationship with food, and in truth, yourself.
The next most important thing to say here is that there is an inherent link between emotional eating, disordered eating and eating disorders. It is a sliding scale of severity, but I would encourage you to reach out to a Medical Professional if you feel like you may have any of the following eating disorders:
Anorexia Nervosa - severe food restriction and sometimes extreme exercising and other purging behaviours
Bulimia Nervosa - repeatedly binging on large amounts of food and then purging it
Muscle Dysmorphia - affecting men more than women, a disruptive obsession with musculature and physique. The individual will fixate on obtaining the ‘perfect’ form of musculature.
Orthorexia Nervosa - someone becomes so obsessed with planning a perfect diet that it disrupts their life.
There are 12 eating disorders and if your experience isn’t represented above then please head here to find out more.
Added to that there are some excellent charities that will be able to help you as well:
BEAT - UK
NEDA - America
Butterfly Foundation - Australia
Despite there being a link between eating disorders and emotional eating, I am not a medical professional. I will not be dealing with how to help you with an eating disorder. This blog will be about how to heal your emotional eating tendencies. If you recognise yourself to have any of the above eating disorders then please contact one of the charities above, or see your GP; please do this.
The only other thing I want to say is to thank you for being here. Thank you for trusting my words to try and help you through such a difficult topic.
Thank you for being open and willing to do the work involved in improving your relationship with food, and yourself as well.
It can be overcome. It can be worked on each and every day, and I have every faith you can conquer this.
So take my hand, and let’s help you figure this out so that you can stop being overwhelmed and controlled by your emotional eating behaviours.
We will find solutions.
I promise.
Table of Contents for How To Heal Emotional Eating:
What triggers/causes emotional eating?
Strategies to stop emotional eating
How to improve your relationship with food
What Triggers/Causes Emotional Eating?
This is a big list - and even the list I have curated here doesn’t cover it all, simply because the causes would be very different for everyone.
Stress
Boredom
Feeling unheard
Feeling unappreciated
Feeling overweight
Feeling lonely
Food guilt
The need for affection
The Media
Living in a fat-phobic society
Medical concerns
Feeling out of control
Lack of self-confidence
Lack of self-esteem
Addiction to food
This Blog post will reach thousands and thousands of people, and they will all resonate with something on that list. This is good news for you because it shows how normal it is. It shows that you’re not the only person who struggles with this and that you aren’t alone.
And not being alone is always a good place to be.
I can remember two very clear occasions when emotional eating took me over. I am a human being with a good understanding of my emotional self, I don’t suppress emotions and I do have a balanced relationship with food.
The first was when my agent, who I had been with since I left Drama School, told me that he could no longer represent me.
The second was when I split up with one of my past girlfriends.
On both occasions, I responded to my emotions with alcohol - and that does seem to be the food I go to when I do emotionally react to food.
However, on both occasions, I knew that I was emotionally resilient for that reaction to not embed itself into me as a habit.
I had two things helping me here.
The first is my resilience. I do think of myself as more resilient than your average person, I don’t think you could be a semi-professional football referee and not be a resilient human.
The second was the fact I was responding with alcohol. That put a natural barrier in place for me to not allow it to become a habit - because I know how addictive such a substance can be, and because of this my objective brain will always take over.
The causes of my reactions are quite clear here. The ending of two very significant relationships
in my life. Things that meant a great deal to me, and still do.
Please remember this:
“To fix emotional eating, don’t focus on the eating: focus on the emotions”
Every time I have a client working with me online on my Strong & Confident Program, and they tell me that they are struggling with emotional eating, they always follow it up with this statement:
“I love food”
We ALL love food.
Truly we do, because food gives us life. Whenever you say this statement or my clients say it to time, they are actually saying:
“I am addicted to the comfort that food gives me when I am feeling vulnerable. Food is my safety”
And this makes much more sense at a neurological level. In the study Mood, food and obesity [1] they illustrate this pathway really clearly:
In the study they also state:
“Reward and gratification associated with food consumption leads to dopamine (DA) production, which in turn activates reward and pleasure centres in the brain. An individual will repeatedly eat a particular food to experience this positive feeling of gratification. This type of repetitive behaviour of food intake leads to the activation of brain reward pathways that eventually overrides other signals of satiety and hunger. Thus, a gratification habit through a favourable food leads to overeating and morbid obesity”
This is critical for your understanding on how emotional eating works. When you eat, you get a hormonal response to the food you are eating, through what is also known as the “feel good” hormone; dopamine.
When you eat, you feel good, at a cellular level. Food bridges the gap for you.
Let's say you have had a disagreement with your boss at work, and they patronised you, made your points or concerns feel worthless and you were frustrated and upset by the whole exchange.
You might then turn to food because of these feelings. By doing that, you know you will get the sense of pleasure and comfort which you are craving.
This pleasure and comfort come in the form of dopamine. The more you practice this routine, the more you will come to rely on it. You also learn to develop this routine in other areas of your life where you might feel vulnerable.
And before you know it, your emotional eating has become a habit, a reflex, that feels out of your control, and the part of this equation that seems easier to fix, is trying to fix the food you are eating, as opposed to the emotions you are feeling, because you physically see the result of the emotions in the food, but seldom in life is trying to change the result of something a worthwhile endeavour without fixing what is causing that result.
The reason I have outlined all of this at the start of this post is so that you can now see why it is so hard to heal emotional eating, you are not just having to wrestle with your emotional core, but also your physiological self.
And that’s ok. It can be worked upon, and understanding your emotional eating in this way will hopefully help you start the process of healing from it. because you can now empathise with yourself a lot more on why it has been so damn hard, as opposed to just feeling like a constant failure every time you try.
So how do you heal from emotional eating…
Strategies to Stop Emotional Eating
The first thing to say is that you shouldn’t shout at yourself, nor should you think that it is a switch that can be turned off overnight.
You will always feel emotions. You must eat.
We cannot stop these two human things, so just trying to “stop” will be futile, I assure you.
My best piece of advice when it comes to healing emotional eating starts with the following quote which I want you to imprint on your brain.
Space and Time
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Take that mental picture of the quote…
This is one of the most powerful quotes there is when it comes to understanding human behaviour. Viktor E. Frankl was an Auschwitz survivor during World War Two and after the war, he became a psychologist developing his theory of psychology called logotherapy in Vienna.
Logotherapy is based on the belief that striving to find meaning in life is the primary, most powerful motivating driving force in humanity.
When you are in a pattern of emotional eating there are a series of events that occur which causes you to “emotionally eat”.
Conflict occurs which will trigger/upset you with someone else or within yourself
Your search for a resolution to the conflict doesn’t end positively.
No human collaborative resolution occurs.
You find emotional resolution in the food you eat.
It is the lack of resolution in steps two and three that drive you to emotional eating.
The timeframe will always differ based on different situations and how strong the emotions are or how intense the conflict is, but in every situation there is one common occurrence:
You are failing to find a resolution to your conflict.
In the quote above “resolution” is what Viktor E. Frankl is referring to when he says “space".
When you are faced with a conflict, the most important thing to do is to develop your own space. When we are in conflict as humans we often look for a resolution to conflict from an outer source; another person, a parent, a partner, a child, or a colleague.
The issue you have here is that you aren’t taking responsibility for managing your emotional self, you are allowing others to do it for you…fast forward that ten to twenty years and your whole centred self is dependent on others.
Which removes your own power.
Jim Carey was right:
Or more: you have the power.
And your power to lies in creating space and space is the key to healing you from this complex web of emotional eating.
So how do you create space and time in order to choose a different response to your emotions?
Strategy 1: Sit with uncomfortable emotions
This is a lot harder than it sounds which often means it is the first place to look - the harder the work, likely, the more positive the result.
One of the more obvious ways to create space and time is to simply let time pass. The issue with this is that it will mean sitting in the uncomfortable feelings that are driving you towards emotional eating.
The food you eat is your current solution to these feelings, but you also want to stop using food as the solution to these feelings. Here you need to get objective about the role food is playing in your life in these moments.
When you “fix” these feelings with food it is temporary relief because soon after you begin to feel guilty and upset about the food you just ate, leading you to more uncomfortable emotions. When this occurs you need to work with objectivity towards your food. Recognise this role it is having in this cycle of behaviour and do things to distract yourself from reaching for the food:
- Go for a walk or get some exercise in
- Journal about what caused your emotional state
- Talk to a friend about what happened
- Meditate for 10mins and practice some box breathing
- Reflect on how the situation could have occurred differently, what you weren’t happy about with what happened and how you might re-approach a similar situation in the future.
All of these actions are designed to help you process the emotion and distract you away from the need to reach for that food. To pattern interrupt your default setting, so that over time you can develop a different reflex in reaction to an emotional trigger.
Strategy 2: Have a structured diet
There are very few things in fitness that a structured diet will not help tremendously with, and emotional eating is high on that list.
In this day and age, we don’t protect our meal times as much as we need to. Whether that is protecting the time we actually eat, or whether it is protecting the moment we have with our food from distractions and other intrusions which de-values the role food has in your life.
Your body is then constantly guessing when it is going to be fed, and how it is going to be fed, and your relationship with food is equally compromised because hormonally you have a lack of regulation, and you aren’t valuing how food can impact your life each and every day.
By eating in a structured manner, you will manage your hunger hormones in a much more level way, and this will allow you to not overreact to your hunger signals when you are feeling stressed in other parts of your life.
A structured diet is also the first step to repairing your relationship with food in all areas - something that you should always be looking to improve, to help heal emotional eating. You have a right to eat, you have a right to nourish yourself with food, as opposed to allowing your emotions to dominate all aspects of your diet.
A structured diet should look like this:
Breakfast.
Lunch.
Dinner.
Two snacks.
Each meal must fit on one plate.
You should also eat uninterrupted and participate as much as possible in the making and creating of the food.
FOR MORE HELP wITH THIS HEAD HERE:
Strategy 3: Sleep
A lot like having a more improved structure to your diet, there are few things that optimal sleep doesn’t help cure. The issue here is that optimal sleep isn’t as available to everyone as being able to structure a diet properly is.
I do believe, deep down, you know this next statement to be true: lack of sleep equals more emotional responses to the world around you.
We are all more cranky when we are tired. We are all more sensitive when we are tired. We are all more stressed when we are tired.
This means that we are also a lot more emotional when we are tired, and therefore more susceptible to emotional eating.
There is a part of your brain which is responsible for your emotional responses to the world, it is known as your amygdala. The less sleep you have, the more active your amygdala is, and therefore the more likely you are to respond emotionally to stimuli around you.
Therefore the more likely you are to try and fix that feeling with food.
This is important for you to know for two reasons. The first is that there are some easy wins here for you. If you can improve your sleep, in any way that is accessible to you, then you will naturally be more likely to improve the chances of healing your emotional eating.
The other reason is that you now know that you can take action to improve your emotional eating in an accessible way, because we all have to sleep right. So by optimising that, you have a clear and direct path to improving this aspect of your life, overnight.
Some top tips I have for improving your sleep can be found here.
Strategy 4: Stop trying to change the size of your body
If emotional eating is a constant recurrence in your life and that is paired with constantly trying to lose weight then your desire to lose weight will always be a difficult process.
This comes down to the foundations you are setting yourself up with.
To lose weight and to be able to sustain it you will inevitably need to have a good relationship with food, as well as yourself.
One of the key aspects of building a better relationship with food, is loving the role food has n your life, as well as loving yourself within that process, and for as long as you are eating in a guilt-laden emotional state, then you will forever be destroying that relationship with the food you are eating.
Food is love. Food is nourishment.
In the same way, I am always telling my clients that the gym is a place to get stronger, I am telling them that their food is not there to be demonized, in fact, is a thing in your life to be celebrated and enjoyed.
Food is not destorying your body. It is sustaining it.
When you only view the food you are eating through the prism of how it is causing you to gain weight, as opposed to it actually keeping you alive, then you will inevitably begin to walk down a path of developing a toxic relationship with your food.
But you can’t avoid eating your food.
And then you reach emotionally to this frustrating situation you are in.
This leads to more food, which leads to more destruction of how you feel about the food and yourself.
The best way to stop this cycle is to stop trying to lose weight and start trying to build better habits and relationships with those habits surrounding your food.
And then by taking the pressure of your physique away from your food, and building these better habits, you will more than likely end up with a much stronger and more solid foundation to set a weight loss goal when you feel in a much stronger place with which to do that.
Some things that you will need to work on to get into this stronger position would be:
Releasing your guilty associations with food
Engaging in a much more balanced diet
Sticking to structured eating as outlined above
Keeping yourself hydrated
Not feeling exhausted at the prospect of being on a diet aka “diet fatigue”
No longer view yourself as “on a diet” or associate with a particular dietary style
The aim for you is to turn around that mental war you have with yourself which is associated with trying to lose weight. Once you do that, by working on the bullet points I laid out above, then you can begin to see the positive role food has in your life.
How to improve your relationship with food
Being an emotional eater is a sign that you don’t have a very positive relationship with food.
And if you start taking on everything else I have outlined in this article, then I would hazard a guess your relationship with food will start to improve.
However, there are some other signs that you might need to work on your relationship with food:
Avoidance of “bad” foods
Speaking about food in the negative most of the time
Speaking about yourself in the negative most of the time
You have “can” and “cannots’” in terms of what you eat outside of medical reasons
You believe certain foods are “good” and certain foods are “bad”
You are stressed when eating in a social setting because the food choice is out of your control
You ignore your hunger cues and fullness cues
You are overly reliant on calorie counting to control your food
You have had a history of yo-yo dieting
You over-exercise in response to overeating
You engage in disordered eating patterns or engage in eating disorder behaviour
You might not relate to all the things on that list, but you probably have one or two that really stood out to you.
But don’t worry, like any relationship, if you put in the work you can get more out of it and heal what is going on here.
Releasing yourself from dichotomous thinking
When I say: “Pizza”, “Doughnuts”, “Alcohol”, “Sugar”, or “Cake” what is the first word you think of in relation to these foods?
And when I say “Salad”, “Vegetables”, “Water”, “Protein”, or “Unprocessed Foods” - what word springs to mind?
This is dichotomous thinking; believing that certain things only fall into a good or bad category.
The truth is that all food has a place in your life - all food nourishes a part of yourself. A doughnut can be like eating a small hug, which has an emotional nourishment to it, and eating a broccoli stem might have a nutrient value that provides nourishment.
Either way, you are being nourished by that food.
Food has no moral value, and by telling yourself that eating a bag of crisps is naughty or bad for you, you are essentially telling yourself that you are naughty or bad.
And over time, if you do this with everything you eat, that will have an effect on your self-esteem - believe me, I have seen it in thousands of clients over the years.
It is also standing in the way of your ability to actually lose weight, as this study [2] describes:
“We conclude that holding dichotomous beliefs about food and eating may be linked to a rigid dietary restraint, which in turn impedes people’s ability to maintain a healthy weight.””
This thinking is often related to diet culture in the sense that you have an ingrained belief that eating “good” foods will lead you to lose weight and change your physique.
If you are trying to heal emotional eating, then that should be the goal, and in order to get there, understand that you require a balance of all foods in your diet because that is part of the process of healing this relationship.
If you do feel like you need a physique goal associated to this project, then I would suggest getting stronger should be your goal and that will help release the pressure of always trying to lose weight.
Remember, nothing bad can come of getting stronger…can it?
2. You have to give yourself permission to eat anything
This relates to my first point about dichotomous thinking.
But knowing there are no good or bad foods is one thing, actually allowing yourself to eat that way is a whole other.
In my experience, the lack of permission to eat anything always comes from a place of fear.
And fear is:
False
Expectation
Appearing
Real
Your fear of eating a McDonald’s is that it will lead you to gain body fat. When in truth, it really doesn’t.
A common misconception here is that 3500kcal equals one pound of body fat. In strict terms, it’s actually between 3,436kcal and 3,752kcal.
But if you were to eat 3,500kcals in one sitting then you still wouldn’t gain 1lb of body fat. This is because your metabolism is perpetually working. You have to digest the food, you are likely moving when you eat it and still moving throughout the day, you are breathing, you might be fidgeting and all of this leads to you burning calories.
Therefore the key message here is:
You need to eat 3500kcals MORE than you burn each day to gain 1lb of body fat
One Large McDonalds Big Mac Meal has around 1,320kcals in it. Three of those in one day would be around 3960kcals. So to gain one pound of body fat, to be eating 3500kcals MORE than you burn each day, you need to eat 6 Lagre Big Mac Meals.
Now I am not saying that you have a free pass to eat 5 Big Mac Meals every day. I am simply trying to outline the scientific facts behind body weight and help you to release your false expectations when you engage in eating such food.
Of course, I would always recommend a varied diet, full of nourishment, but never to the detriment of your physical or emotional health.
Balance. Always.
3. Mindful Eating…
In truth, I am not a huge fan of this term, simply because it has been overused and therefore
over complicated.
All mindful eating really is, is the following:
Be involved in the preparation of your food as much as possible.
Sit with your food with no distractions other than family and friends, at a table.
Give thanks for the food you are eating, and the people you are with.
Give thanks for what the food is doing to help sustain your life.
That’s it.
There’s no need to worry about it above that. The first port of call here is to take away all distractions. Don’t scroll social media when eating dinner. Don’t watch the news when you are eating lunch.
You can then layer in other questions about the food you are eating to help you with this.
How does the food feel?
What am I enjoying about eating this food?
Why am I eating this food?
What is my emotional state when eating this food?
And so on and so forth.
In Conclusion…
As you work on this process you can begin to look for signs that you are improving your relationship with food and getting a much stronger relationship with it:
Not feeling guilty about eating food.
Avoiding restricting certain foods from your diet.
Feeling less stressed when food choice is out of your control.
Not feeling the need to burn off calories through exercise.
Seeing the way you speak about food change.
I really really hope you can start to notice some of these things change in your life as you improve that relationship with food, and allow yourself to heal from emotional eating.
Being a slave to food your whole life, through fear and anxiety, is no way to live, and it is actually getting in the way of you being able to live the life you want.
Work on what is laid out in this article, and i truly hope it brings you the freedom you deserve to enjoy.
What’s Next…
Well, I am an Online Coach who has helped thousands of people work through the challenges in this article.
And it would be my pleasure to help you too.
My program, which is personal one-to-one online training called the Strong & Confident Program.
If you have ever wanted to achieve the following:
✅ Escape the constant dread of dieting?
✅ Release the guilt you attach to eating certain types of food?
✅ Learn to stop worrying about “the pesky last few pounds” and focus on all your body can do?
✅ Become truly happy with what your body is and what is capable of?
✅ Enjoy the feeling of being stronger and fitter as opposed to trying to reduce your size all the time?
✅ Achieve all of this and still lose body fat at the same time without huge restrictions and slavery to a fitness regime?
✅ Do it all on your own schedule, in your own way, with a program specifically designed for you?
Then please click on the button below and fill out an application form to start working with me.
If you feel like you need more help balancing your relationship with food then you can look through the following articles of mine as well:
Thank you so much for reading my work, and good luck with building a stronger relationship with food.
I cannot wait to see how you go!
Coach Adam
References:
Singh M. Mood, food, and obesity. Front Psychol. 2014 Sep 1;5:925. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00925. PMID: 25225489; PMCID: PMC4150387.
Palascha A, van Kleef E, van Trijp HC. How does thinking in Black and White terms relate to eating behavior and weight regain? J Health Psychol. 2015 May;20(5):638-48. doi: 10.1177/1359105315573440. PMID: 25903250.