Better Ways to Understand Emotional Eating

1st October 2022 | Author: Bianca Skilbeck

Years ago, as a somewhat freshly qualified therapist, I stepped eagerly into the first of many eating disorder specific trainings that I would undertake.

Personally, I was reckoning with almost two decades worth of my own disordered behaviour and thoughts around food and exercise. Professionally, I wanted to learn more if I was to work with this population.

Whilst I’d gotten to a point where I’d put the vast majority of disordered behaviour and thoughts behind me, there was still something that I was less ready to acknowledge. This thing felt so stuck, I wasn’t sure I ever really would overcome it. What was this thing?

Emotional eating.

Emotional eating felt like the last bastion for me. I no longer restricted food (at least overtly) or skipped meals, and I wasn’t bingeing. Nor was I exercising in a compulsive or excessive way. Most importantly, I wasn’t obsessively thinking about food or focusing on body image.

Nonetheless, I found myself, often, gravitating towards food in times of stress, or feeling tired, lonely, anxious, or depressed. The problem felt compounded by the fact that it wasn’t just the so-called negative emotions that I ate for; I also ate when I was happy, celebrating, or simply just relaxing. I ate for all emotions. A sentiment I’ve since heard many of my client’s echo.

So, there I was, on the first day of class. We tend to attune to information that is more salient to us, however, it seemed like virtually the first lesson, the first question that came out of our trainer’s mouth….

How do we choose what we eat?

A chorus of suggestions ensued from the group. We choose based on availability of food. The time of day and what meal it is. How hungry we are. What we can afford. What fits within our cultural or ethical frameworks. What we think might be good for us. What we think our body needs. All, obviously valid questions a person would ask themselves when choosing food.

Yet, as this conversation continued, what we began to find was that all of these questions were just the beginning questions. Because as we worked our way through this discussion, the question of how we choose food almost always boiled down to one final question….

What do we feel like eating?

Right there and then, my trainer blew the lid on my dilemma.  

What she demonstrated was that all eating is based on feeling. All eating is emotional. Eating is intrinsically and inextricably linked to how we feel. She demonstrated that if we are to understand emotional eating better, we first need to accept that all of our decisions about food at least in part, come from feeling and emotion, and that that is not a negative, harmful, or pathological thing.

Whilst not the whole piece of the puzzle by any means, this insight set the foundation for everything else that I have come to learn over subsequent years whilst I have dived deeper into the world of disordered eating, the psychology of eating, intuitive eating, and the non-diet approach.

What follows here is a list of points that I have come to ask myself in the pursuit to better understand emotional eating if and when it occurs. I have listed these points in two categories; the diet culture checklist, and the psychological health checklist…..

The Diet Culture Checklist

 1. Are you actually hungry?

Whilst this might sound terribly obvious, it still has to be said; are you emotionally eating because you are not actually meeting your daily caloric or nutritional needs? Many of us have spent years, perhaps a whole lifetime, entrenched in diet culture; a system of cultural and systemic beliefs that thin is better and dietary restraint is good and necessary. For some people who experience emotional eating, it is not uncommon to find that they are actually eating below their body’s requirements, perhaps in an attempt to lose or ‘control’ their weight, maybe out of habit or subconscious belief about not wanting to eat “too much”, or even from accidentally not eating enough, i.e., skipping meals when busy, etc.

The problem with undereating is that it leaves you vulnerable. Your body doesn’t care if you’re bikini-ready (hint: you already are). Your body just cares about its hunger and fullness signals and whether its needs have been met today. Eating below your caloric or nutritional needs leaves you vulnerable to not just emotional or comfort eating, but also rebound binge-eating and getting stuck in the diet cycle. Nine times out of ten, the physiological and biological drive to get needs met will win. If you are unsure if you are meeting your caloric or nutritional needs on a day-to-day basis, it is well worth reaching out to a non-diet dietitian to help guide you on this. You might be surprised! If this is something that you are looking for, please reach out to us HERE and we will be happy to point you in the right direction.

2. Do you equate eating or food, with guilt or shame?

It doesn’t matter how you are eating, why you are eating the way you are, how much you feel you have lost control, or how much or for how long you have been trying to change. Eating behaviours and food decisions are intrinsically linked to how we feel, and for better or worse, how we feel is simply not always rational.

Human emotions can be messy, which means that sometimes food decisions can be messy also. If you want to heal your relationship with food, you must therefore separate eating and food, from guilt or shame.

If you find yourself in a pattern of emotional eating, an important question to ask yourself is how much you have paired guilt or shame with how you eat? It is normal to feel frustrated, and yes, of course you want to create a more intuitive relationship with food which doesn’t feel so fuelled by the whims of your emotions. Nonetheless, eating is intrinsically tied to how we feel and there is absolutely no point in beating yourself up about it. Beating yourself up about it will only do more harm.

In the words of Geneen Roth,

“If we shame ourselves, we believe we end up loving ourselves. [But] it has never been true, not for a moment, that shame leads to love. Only love leads to love.”

 3. Do you simply enjoy the food, and that’s not a bad thing? (until it gets demonised)

Closely linked to the above is the ways in which diet culture complicates and can turn our relationship with food into a toxic one.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying any type of food. Yes, any type of food. Your body will take and use nutritional and energetic content from anything edible that you give it. Nonetheless, the reductionist and moralistic language of diet culture would have you believe otherwise. The problem with this is that it often leaves us fearful of the foods we love and enjoy the most. You could argue that this might be okay if it was sustainable? But it’s not. Not just because fearing and avoiding foods strips us of joy and spontaneity and pushes us into disordered ways of thinking about food. But because in large part, it simply doesn’t work.

Denying ourselves the calories that we need OR the food that we enjoy, increases what is known in addiction research as ‘salience’; salience being understood as “the quality of being particularly noticeable or important”.

Now, I want to be very careful here. This does NOT mean that food in and of itself is addictive. Despite the ubiquity of the term ‘food addiction’ in research and popular media, the construct is highly contested, and there are a lot of reasons to be sceptical. In her article on the subject, Marci Evans points out; 

“Food is designed to be pleasurable. Pleasure is part of our survival mechanism, so we seek out food”

What I suggest, is that food in and of itself is not addictive, but the ways in which we engage or are fearful to engage with it, can make it feel so.

Research shows that caloric deprivation increases the responsivity of brain regions which are associated with attention, reward, and motivation, and that the duration of deprivation is positively correlated with brain activation in regions implicated in attention, reward, and motivation in response to images, anticipated receipt, and receipt of “palatable” (i.e. yummy!) food.

In plain language; when we restrict foods that we love, our brains become much more ‘interested’ in those foods. Moreover, those who have a history of dieting and restricting food or specific foods have a much stronger tendency to gravitate towards those foods in times of stress or high emotion.

The questions we therefore need to ask ourselves, are:

• How much do I gravitate towards particular foods because I have a history and/or present of denying myself those exact foods?
• How much do I gravitate towards these foods because on some level I believe that I’m not going to let myself have them again?
• How much do I gravitate towards these foods because on some level I know I’m not going to really let myself enjoy them because I feel guilty?
• What would happen if I gave myself full and unconditional permission to include the foods that I love into my diet?

The Psychological Health Checklist

4. Do I use food to regulate my emotions?

Eating food is a soothing, comforting, and pleasurable experience. It’s supposed to be that way, otherwise we’d be less inclined to seek it out.

Nonetheless, you may find yourself using food to regulate emotions; to experience a sense of grounding, distraction, escape, or numbness when your emotions are otherwise dysregulated, scary, or feeling out of control.

If this is something that you experience, there may be a number of reasons. For many, eating for emotional regulation is not unrelated to points 2 and 3; diet culture took the food away and made it bad or naughty to begin with, thereby making food more salient. In this instance, for many, dieting became intricately woven into emotional regulation. In an uncertain and unpredictable world, dieting became the mechanism with which to feel either in or out of control.

For others, however, it may have been the first way that they taught themselves to cope with difficult life situations. Food was available as a comforting and soothing friend. It was better than some of the alternatives, and what’s more is that it worked. Not in the long-term of course, but if we consider all of our fundamental needs for safety and comfort, then seeking food out even if it was only short-term, makes sense.

For many people who experience emotional or comfort eating, there is an intersection or interaction between diet-culture, emotional regulation, and the need to experience soothing, safety, and comfort. If you find yourself in that situation, you may consider using therapy to disentangle where diet culture begins and emotional regulation ends, so that you can start to explore alternate ways to self-regulate.

5. Is there a scarcity of pleasure in my life?

It’s been said enough times here; eating is a pleasurable experience, especially when it is the foods that we really enjoy. That’s okay, it’s a good thing. We should enjoy our food.

Some people who find themselves gravitating towards food for comfort however, may find that food is one of the ONLY places in life that provides them with comfort or pleasure, and this is what keeps them stuck in the cycle of emotional or comfort eating.

If this is the case for you, you needn’t shame yourself for it, and you definitely needn’t take it away as a source of pleasure or comfort. What you can do, however, is think about what you can ‘add’ to your pleasure checklist. Think about it this way. We all have a list of things that we find enjoyable, pleasurable, restful, restorative, or reenergising. What is on your list?

Eating yummy food is definitely on my list, but it’s not the only thing. These days if I find myself turning to food more than I would like to seek comfort, I return to this idea; what am I not spending enough time on from the rest of the list? Rather than focusing on taking food away which is never a good idea, what else can I add to help me to achieve that sense of enjoyment, relaxation, or rejuvenation that I’m ultimately looking for?

6. Do I need to consider the role of a neurodivergent condition that I experience, such as ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) or ASD (autism spectrum disorder)?

Research suggests that neurodivergent folks may experience some extra difficulties in their relationship with food for a whole host of reasons, including but not limited to:

• Sensory aversions
• Increased vulnerability to mood swings, irritability, anxiety, or depression, for which the person may have learned to use food to feel grounded
• Difficulties with concentration which may impact hunger and fullness cues
• Difficulties with interception, which means the ability to pick up on bodily cues such as hunger and fullness
• Difficulties with organisation and food preparation

If you experience a neurodivergent condition that impacts your relationship with food, this doesn’t mean that you can’t improve your relationship with food. It simply means that developing a more intuitive and peaceful relationship with food may require some extra additions or ‘work-arounds’, to make it work for you.

7. Is this just a habit

Finally, we have habit. I’ve left this point until last because after sifting through the diet culture and psychological reasons for emotional eating, most people find that they have almost entirely been able to identify and understand their emotional eating better, and that very little or none of it had anything to do with habit.

Nonetheless, habit can be a component for some people for the simple fact that humans are creatures of habit and routine. We find comfort and predictability in what is habitual. If, after reflecting upon points 1-6 you still feel that some aspect of your emotional eating is down to habit, then that is good news, because habit is less ‘loaded’ than the rest of it. If part of your emotional eating can be explained by habit, then an intentional change in the routine or structure of your day/s might be required to break that habit.

Be sure, however, to keep in mind points 1-6 if you decide to change routine or structure. Diet-culture (that we all live in) and the psychological reasons for turning to food can sneak in quickly without us realising. Therefore, if for example, you believe that you are eating out of habit and you’d like to change that, a quick ecology check might be to ask yourself, “why do I want to change this?”. If your answer is because you want to lose weight, or because you feel ashamed about it (for example), then we have to return to points 1-6 because this answer indicates that it’s not solely about habit. However, if your answer is “because it doesn’t make me feel good, and I want to spend my time/energy/resources in a way that serves me better”, then this would be an answer more suggestive of pure habit. In which case, happy experimenting.

So, there’s the list. Seven points in total. Which resonated most for you? Are there multiple points that you think are important for you?

If after reading this list you feel like you would like to unpack your emotional eating in a safe, non-judgemental, and helpful space, please do not hesitate to get in touch HERE, we would love to hear from you.