I used to deeply relate to the line from Austin Powers, ‘I eat because I’m unhappy and I’m unhappy because I eat’. I was stuck in an endless emotional eating cycle: experience stress, need comfort, eat something, feel a temporary moment of comfort, positive feelings evaporate, guilt sets in, need soothing from this new guilt, start over again.
What Causes Emotional Eating?
Most of what people assume is emotional eating is usually a response to either physical or mental food restriction. Our body’s natural reaction to deprivation (no matter how ‘gentle’ the deprivation), is to protect us from what it perceives as danger (famine). This sense of danger causes us to overeat or feel out of control with food. Christy Harrison describes it as The Restriction Pendulum; ‘A pendulum can’t just stop in the middle when it’s been pulled over to one side. It HAS to swing the opposite direction with equal force.’ Often what feels like emotional eating is actually an intelligent survival mechanism.
What’s Wrong With Emotional Eating?
Wellness culture tells us something is wrong with us if we eat for emotional rather than biological reasons. Advice is everywhere on how to control this shameful behavior. Emotional eating is, however, a practical, normal coping mechanism. It’s convenient, reliable, tastes good, is soothing, and provides a sense of control. Only when turning to food is the only way we know how to cope with feelings is it a problem.
If food isn’t solving the issue, eventually we need to deal with the source of the problem. The design of our primitive brains is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. We use emotions to scan for pain to avoid, so it’s natural to want to avoid intense emotions like shame or guilt. Instead of avoiding them, allowing them to express guides us toward our unmet needs. Rather than label emotions as good or bad, we can reframe them as either productive or unproductive depending on how we respond to them.
Solve the Problem Once and For All
Emotional eating is a clue that something is unbalanced in life. To identify what needs work, there are a few key areas to evaluate. Above all, getting enough sleep drastically impacts our ability to regulate emotions. After sleep, a sense of meaning or purpose and healthy relationships are the two most predictive elements of life satisfaction. Checking in with these aspects of life will highlight any imbalances that need attention.
Another method for managing stress is finding new ways to comfort, nurture, distract, and resolve issues. Connecting with nature, time with friends, going for a walk, and journaling are a few alternative coping mechanisms. If food gets the job done best, guilt-free permission to eat is always a valid option. Eat intentionally, tuning into the senses and savoring the experience. It’s more satisfying than eating in shame, mindlessly inhaling food without enjoying it.
Food is not just fuel, but also celebration, connection, and culture. And emotions are simply sensations of energy moving through the body that need processing. Removing all the noise of wellness culture allows eating and emotions to take their appropriate places as individual areas of a multi-faceted life.
If you’re ready to adopt a non-diet approach to food in order to simplify and take the drama out of life, I would love to tell you about my program, The Empowered Mind-Body Confident Project.
