How Do I Manage Emotional Eating?
Spoiler alert, it’s not about the food… it’s about learning to regulate your emotions without it.
Emotional eating is an emotions issue… not a food issue.
But first, what technically is emotional eating? It’s a term used to describe increased eating in response to emotions, where emotions are regulated by food intake. So really what’s happening is that instead of regulating emotions ourselves, we’re hoping that food will do it for us.
Most of us use emotional eating in a few primary ways:
To escape negative self awareness — we avoid dealing with whatever is personally “threatening” right now and instead focus on our environment (aka food)
To mask what we’re really feeling — if you eat in response to work stress, for example, rather than allowing yourself to feel stressed about work, you misattribute perceived stress to eating instead (i.e. you’re now stressed about eating instead of being stressed about work)
To increase positive emotions — eating “bad” foods is enjoyable so we try to usurp our current negative emotions with the positive ones we get from food
So you see, emotional eating serves a purpose. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t do it. It’s an attempt to solve a problem (i.e. not wanting to feel difficult emotions) and while this feels like a helpful regulation strategy in the moment, it’s really just a band aid.
And when it comes down to it, the problem here isn’t that negative emotions are bad (all emotions serve a purpose), but rather that we lack the adaptive emotion regulation strategies available to regulate those negative emotions.
So what can we do about it? As always, the first step is awareness. What is the primary emotion that you’re eating in response to? And then think about the secondary emotion… what are you feeling in response to that first feeling? So if your primary emotion is stress, the secondary emotion might be aggravation that you feel stressed in the first place. And it’s that secondary emotion that we want to dive into because that’s the one that’s placing a judgment on the first one.
So the next step is to redefine what those primary emotions mean. If you feel stressed, you don’t HAVE to be aggravated about it. I’m not saying the stress is going to wash away, but that’s okay. You’re allowed to have a feeling and sit with it and not do anything about it.
Being emotional is a part of being human and suppressing those emotions will only make things worse. Let yourself feel the feelings but try to separate those primary feelings from the secondary judgments.
So next time you feel yourself heading for the cookies because of some emotional trigger, stop and ask yourself what you’re actually feeling and trying to avoid. And then think about how do you actually want to react to emotional situations? What would be a way to manage your emotions in a way that aligns with your values?
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