Top 5 Feelings Associated with Emotional Eating
How often have you sat watching TV, and eaten a biscuit or a piece of chocolate, promising yourself it will just be this bit. Then, a little later, you get another, then another… Emotional eating like this is something a majority of people in food-rich countries confess to doing on a regular basis.
What is Emotional Eating?
Emotional eating doesn’t have to be about ‘big emotions’. In fact, some people loose their appetite when faced with really big challenges and upheavals. Many people know someone who has gone through a bereavement or divorce, for example, and seemed to lose the will to live. This can lead to a kind of unconscious hunger strike.
Loneliness, boredom and distress, though, are very common culprits for emotional eating, as are anger and anxiety.
Often, you may not even be aware of what is triggering your emotional eating. Some people I have worked with end up using the fact of having cravings as the starting point to explore what might be upsetting them. If they are feeling the cravings, there will be some trigger underlying them, it’s a matter of finding it.
Possible Triggers
For some people it’s a rough day at work, feeling angry at injustice, mistreatment or just plain jerk-y behaviour. It could also be worry about an upcoming assessment or presentation, whether in education or at work. For others it could be the everyday stresses of being a parent. Or maybe it’s anxiety around a change like moving home or job, or starting a new relationship. Even when you recognise the positives in something, it can still cause stress.
Equally, loneliness, boredom or just feeling a little low are frequent triggers that get someone reaching for a treat. In fact, the top 5 emotions named by people who give in to comfort eating are:
- distress
- anger
- anxiety
- sadness
- boredom
Food and Mood
Interestingly, it’s not just emotion that can affect your food choices. Equally, what you eat can influence your mood.
For example, eating high fat foods can leave you feeling listless, while your body focuses on digestion. Sugary foods can lead to rapid mood swings, while caffeinated foods and drinks can cause irritability.
In the opposite direction, omega-rich fish and nuts such as almonds and walnuts can balance your emotions out. Lean meat, eggs and chickpeas/lentils lead to greater alertness and energy. And nuts, beans chicken and fish can support your overall happiness.
The Science of Cravings and Low Mood
There was a fascinating study done by Dr. Hisham Ziauddeen where people were put in an MRI scanner and shown pictures of trigger foods. Then, the researchers used various methods to lower their mood – sad music, depressing quotes and image – before rescanning the subjects’ brains.
What they found was that when people were feeling sad, the reward centres in their brain lit up far more strongly. Your brain wants to establish a better mood, so it encourages you to take action to make yourself feel better. Unfortunately, the rewards you have become used to come with negative longer term consequences.
And so you can get stuck in a vicious cycle: you eat something to feel better, then feel guilty that you ate it, re-triggering your need for something to help you feel better.
Breaking the Cycle of Emotional Eating
As I discuss in my Top 3 Tips to Finally Release Emotional Eating webinar, there are a number of important steps you can take to get out of this pattern.
One of those is to use psychosensory techniques, especially EFT tapping. This tool reduces the stress you feel, with a proven drop in cortisol levels. It also actually rewires your brain.
Dr. Peta Stapleton did another MRI study where she showed participants images of trigger foods to measure their baseline response. These people then did four weekly two-hour tapping sessions before being scanned again. They showed a significant decrease in their reward centres’ response to trigger foods. Their neural network had changed, lowering their cravings in the long term!
So, are you ready to break the cycle and finally release emotional eating?
