Many people who find it difficult to lose weight and keep it off engage in emotional eating. From the day we are born we start to associate food with comfort. It started when you were a newborn and were fed when you cried. This association with food gets deeply ingrained as we grow up. When you fell and hurt yourself you might have gotten a treat. Birthdays, communion, and all sort of celebrations often center around food.
Research has identified 5 categories of emotional eating.
Emotional Eating can be divided into 5 categories:
- Sensory Gratification – that is eating for joy. It is pleasing your palate and letting you appreciate food that you enjoy. By letting yourself enjoy food, you will actually reduce the amount of food you consume. Using Mindful Eating will help you appreciate and enjoy your food more and therefore help you eat less.
- Comfort eating – Thinking back to your childhood and foods you loved and bring back fond memories. it could be having a cup of cocoa with family in front of the fire, or chicken soup when you were sick. Eating comfort foods occasionally actually is necessary to develop a healthy relationship with food, as long as you stay in touch with your physical hunger signals and where you are at the hunger scale.
- Distraction – Using food for distraction is problematic as you won’t be able to identify feelings you are trying to avoid. Food is not an appropriate medium to distract you from feelings, and you will need to learn other coping mechanisms for dealing with string emotions.
- Sedation – This is a more serious form of using food to distract from feelings. It will numb you over extended periods of time from your emotions and you will become unable to distinguish between emotional and physical hunger. Most people using food for sedation feel out of control and experience shame and guilt. This type of eating can lead to addictive behaviour with food.
- Punishment – This is the most severe form of emotional eating and leads to eating large amounts of food in an angry forceful manner. There is no pleasure in eating and sometimes hate can be experienced towards food.
Take a moment to reflect on which of those categories you might fall into.
EMOTIONAL EATING
FIXING YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD
Food can be used to cope with feelings in many ways. Using food to deal with emotions is satisfying your emotional hunger and not your biological hunger. Emotional eating is triggered by feelings, such as boredom, stress, sadness or anger and not by physical hunger. From a very young age, you start to develop emotional associations with food. It starts from the day you are born and are offered breast or bottle milk to feed you and stop you from crying. It continues when you are offered sweets to soothe a fall and a scraped knee. It gets further reinforced with celebrations such as birthdays, communions and weddings and so on. We associate food with comfort, celebration, love, and friendships. Sometimes food is the only friend to soothe pain and loneliness.
Anger, boredom, sadness, stress, and loneliness are emotions you experience throughout your life. Each emotion has its own trigger, but food won’t fix any of these feelings. You may be able to comfort and distract from the emotion for a short time, but food won’t solve your problems. If anything, eating to silence your emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. In order to overcome emotional eating, you will have to deal with the source of the emotion. Often it is difficult to identify the emotions and the reason for overeating.
Once you tune in to what emotion drives you to overeat you may find, in the short term, the emotion intensifies as you are carrying out other activities instead of eating. You will find it won’t last too long as you become more aware of alternative coping strategies.
Overeating in itself often evokes feelings of guilt and shame. You may have short-term emotional comfort from eating, which is quickly followed by guilt and shame, which completely erases the feelings of relief and comfort. In order to learn new coping mechanisms, you need to be gentle with yourself and let go of the guilt. Using food for comfort may have been the main mechanism you had to deal with difficult times in your life.
Anger, boredom, sadness, stress, and loneliness are emotions you experience throughout your life. Each emotion has its own trigger, but food won’t fix any of these feelings. You may be able to comfort and distract from the emotion for a short time, but food won’t solve your problems. If anything, eating to silence your emotional hunger will only make you feel worse in the long run. In order to overcome emotional eating, you will have to deal with the source of the emotion. Often it is difficult to identify the emotions and the reason for overeating.
Once you tune in to what emotion drives you to overeat you may find, in the short term, the emotion intensifies as you are carrying out other activities instead of eating. You will find it won’t last too long as you become more aware of alternative coping strategies.
Overeating in itself often evokes feelings of guilt and shame. You may have short-term emotional comfort from eating, which is quickly followed by guilt and shame, which completely erases the feelings of relief and comfort. In order to learn new coping mechanisms, you need to be gentle with yourself and let go of the guilt. Using food for comfort may have been the main mechanism you had to deal with difficult times in your life.