Well, do you eat when you’re bored? Or upset? Or sad? Wouldn't it be great if you could forget your problems and focus on something else – even if it's just feeling full?
If you said yes to any of these, this means you are eating even though you are not physically hungry in order to make yourself feel better.
In the media and daily life, food is often used as a coping mechanism for negative feelings.
This repeated relationship teaches us how to respond to stress or anxiety. We learn to cope with anxiety or sadness by overeating.
The Science Behind Emotional Eating
The research provides evidence that supports this idea.
In a study from 1987, researchers looked at how much ice cream women ate when they were anxious, depending on whether or not they were dieting. The women who were dieting ate less ice cream than the women who were not dieting.
The results showed that people who were not dieting ate less when they were anxious, while the people who were dieting ate more when they were anxious. There was no difference in how much the two groups of women ate when they were not hungry, regardless of anxiety levels.
Our emotions do not appear to have a direct influence on our physiological hunger cues, unless we are consciously manipulating them.
What’s Wrong With Emotional Eating?
Chocolate can have a positive effect on your mood when you are feeling down. What’s so wrong with that?
There is nothing wrong with trying to make yourself feel better when you are experiencing negative emotions and giving yourself time to recover from a difficult experience. When you eat for reasons other than to fuel your body, there are some physical consequences to your health.
A study found that night-time snacking can make up more than a quarter of the calories you eat in a day.
The average person consumes 300 to 500 calories from snacking throughout the day.
An additional study found strong connections between stress, emotional eating, and increases in biological markers related to diabetes and other long-term health problems.
What Can You Do About Emotional Eating?
Well crap, what do you do now?
Yoga and mindfulness are both very promising when it comes to coping with emotional and stress-related overeating. Woohoo!
Yoga is often used to help people with eating disorders and other mental health issues to relax, feel better, and have more control over their lives.
How do we do this in practice? A study conducted in 2017 found that a three-month Kundalini Yoga practice can help reduce stress levels and the amounts of cortisol and alpha-amylase in the saliva. Yes, a person's stress levels can be determined by looking at their saliva.
After three months of regular practice, participants reported feeling less stress, which was shown by a decreased level of cortisol.
This text is discussing a study which found that redirecting oneself from diving into a bag of granola can be an effective way to avoid emotional eating.
You have other good things going for you in life, but we'll get to that!
How Yoga and Mindfulness Can Help With Emotional Eating
If you want to get the most out of your yoga practice, you need to focus on it both on and off the mat. This will help you get back into the right frame of mind, so you can be more focused, energized, and disciplined. It's harder to get caught up in emotions or the feeling that you deserve something when you're here.
The more you develop other habits such as frequent and regular yoga practice, even when you still have the urge to eat when you’re not hungry, the more it will:
- Make you aware of how strong/deep your cravings go by improving your mindfulness
- Acquaint you with your body through focused movement, breathing, and loving concentration (honoring your hunger and respecting your fullness)
- Build your confidence as you build your practice
- Adopt a flexible mindset
- Give you something else to do
Certified Eating Disorder Specialist Kerry Heath, LPC-S, NCC, CEDS-S of Choosing Therapy, an online therapy platform, explains further:
” Most treatment plans for emotional eating involve using natural methods to manage it. Mindfulness allows clients to focus on the present moment. Activities like yoga help train our minds to focus on the present. People who have issues with emotional eating should pay attention to this because their thoughts are usually negative and involve bad opinions of themselves.
” Kerry Heath emphasizes the importance of learning how to take care of oneself and relax as part of the process of recovering from an eating disorder or condition related to negative body image and an unhealthy relationship with food. When a person is able to care for themselves and redirect negative thoughts, they can break the cycle of coping with emotions through either overeating or undereating.
Yoga and mindfulness can look different for everyone. For some, it’s a 90-minute mat practice full of Sun Salutations, inversions, and balances.
Some people find inner peace by sitting quietly in meditation and enjoying the sounds of life around them, like the smell of grass, flowers, and rain. This practice can help you come back to yourself and put food in its rightful place in your life while creating space in your life to adapt and grow happily and healthily!
Ways to Avoid Emotional Eating
How to stop food addiction and emotional eating forever?
Practice Mindfulness
The best way to create more space for yourself is to take a few deep breaths and pay attention to how your lungs and brain feel with the sudden rush of oxygen.
Stop Destructive Eating Behaviors
Acknowledge that Eating Behaviors Are Not the Real Problem
Weight issues are most commonly addressed through surface behaviors such as bingeing, overeating, or body dissatisfaction.
While these behaviors can cause financial difficulties, health problems and unhappiness, they are not the underlying cause of your issues with food and weight.
The real problem is that the beliefs driving the eating behaviors and emotions are out of control.
If you only address surface behaviors, you will not solve the problem.
However, these eating behaviors are a form of avoidance.
Emotional eating is a way of using food to soothe yourself rather than facing your pain.
You will not be able to learn how to deal with emotions that do not involve food until you stop these behaviors. You will also have the opportunity to discover who you are.
Identify Your Destructive Eating Behaviors
The eating behaviors may include:
- Bingeing (eating a large quantity of food in a short period)
- purging (through forced vomiting, excessive exercise, or by taking laxatives or diuretics)
- hiding or hoarding or stealing food or eating in secret
- overeating under stress or when you’re tired
- Restricting (e.g. not eating all day)
- using illegal drugs to manage your appetite
- dieting or using diet pills
Ask Yourself, “Do I Need to Eat That?”
You have certain eating behaviors for a reason.
It is important to dig deeper and try to understand what drives you to use food the way you do.
When we have tough experiences, we may turn to food as a way to make ourselves feel better. We may use it as a reward, or to give ourselves some comfort.
Our eating behaviors are controlled by two parts of the brain.
The hypothalamus is responsible for regulating the body's need for food. The dopamine reward center controls our desire to eat.
Sometimes people want a specific food so badly that they will ignore their hunger in order to eat it. This is the root cause of emotional eating, binge eating, and obesity.
Regularly ask yourself if you need to eat something or if you are using food for comfort.
If you use food to cope with stress or as a comfort, there is nothing wrong with it. However, it becomes a problem when this becomes a regular eating behavior.
It is important to break the cycle of emotional eating in order to lose weight.
Address Limiting Beliefs Around Emotions
You might have learned that certain emotions are wrong and should be suppressed, either directly or indirectly.
You may have been told to bottle up your emotions and not express them. This may have caused you to avoid expressing your anger, hurt, sadness, etc.
If you grew up believing that it is not acceptable or safe to express emotions, this could have led you to develop coping mechanisms such as emotional eating, purging (self-induced vomiting), or self-harming behaviors.
Positive Beliefs About Emotions
- I have a right to feel my feelings.
- No one can tell me what I “should” feel, even me.
- I don’t have to defend my feelings.
- All my feelings are okay, even anxiety and painful.
- Allowing myself to feel my emotions is healthy.
- My feelings are valuable feedback about what’s happening in my world.
- What I’m feeling will eventually pass.
Manage Your Emotions In Healthier Ways
Acknowledge that Emotions Are Not The Problem
Some people have trouble managing their emotions when it comes to food and weight.
Some people shut down any access to their emotions, while others feel overwhelmed with intense emotions.
Both are unhealthy reactions to emotions. The problem is not with emotions, but with how you deal with them.
The emotions you avoid or suppress can be expressed through the food you eat. This may provide temporary relief but will eventually make the problem worse.
You need to have emotional intelligence to be able to manage your emotions. This includes being able to identify, express, and regulate your emotions.
Identify Your Emotions
By paying attention to your body sensations, you can more easily identify your emotions.
Ask yourself: What am I feeling in my body? What emotion is this?
Use your journal to keep track of the emotions you regularly experience.
If you frequently take the time to check in with your emotions and physical sensations, you will get better at being able to identify them.
Also, pay attention to your emotional expression patterns. Do you tend to binge when feeling overwhelmed? When you're feeling the desire to withdraw, do you find yourself skipping meals?
Understand Your Emotions Better
Our emotions guide us towards what we like and keep us away from danger.
Fear is an emotion that will cause you to react in a way that will either protect you or help you escape from a dangerous situation. Anger is a sign that we’ve encountered injustice. Guilt is a useful emotion because it makes us think about our actions and motivates us to make up for our mistakes. When you're feeling down, it means that something in your life isn't going the way you want it to. Time to make some changes!
The hard part is to figure out what is real and what is just an illusion. When the danger is not real, we can limit our lives with fear. If guilt is not based on reality, it can cause us to feel ashamed of who we are, rather than something we did. This is toxic and negatively impacts our self-esteem.
When you are feeling an emotion, ask yourself what it is telling you about the situation you are in. Emotions can be helpful in understanding what is going on around you and can help you make decisions about how to respond to a situation. Is it real or perceived?
Practice Emotional Regulation
The ability to regulate emotions begins developing in early infancy and continues to develop as we age.
Some people may take their mind off of their anxiety by doing an engaging activity, while others may make themselves feel better by using their senses (smelling a nice perfume, touching a soft texture, hearing soothing music, watching something engaging.)
People who struggle with emotional eating often turn to food when they are feeling overwhelmed or sad.
This isn't necessarily a good idea because it could make you feel worse in the long run.
To stop emotional eating, you need to find better ways to cope with your emotions.
