Emotional eating means that you eat for reasons other than hunger. You may eat because you’re sad, depressed, stressed, or lonely. Or you may use food as a reward. Food can be soothing and distract you from what’s really bothering you.
If you are an emotional eater, you may not listen to your body’s natural hunger and fullness signals. You may eat more than you need or want.
Emotional eating can interfere with making healthy food choices. And it can keep you from getting to a healthy weight and staying there.
What are some signs of emotional eating?
Everyone eats for reasons other than hunger once in a while. But if you notice that you often reach for food out of boredom or for comfort, you may be eating for emotional reasons.
Common signs of emotional eating are:
- Changing your eating habits when you have more stress in your life.
- A feeling of “under performance” with High Expectations from your Career, less motivation to exercise and eat more due to high levels of stress.
- Eating when you are not hungry or when you are full.
- Eating to avoid dealing with a stressful situation.
- Eating to soothe your feelings.
- Using food as a reward. (For example, “That was really a tough job/assignment/argument. I need some ice cream/candy/popcorn!”)
- When you start to identify with Feelings of Guilt and Self Loathing it keeps you in a cyclic pattern with no way out.
- Psychological hunger is a desire to eat that is caused by emotions, like stress, boredom, sadness, or happiness.
Emotional Eating Cycle:
You feel guilty and powerless over food→ Something Happens That Upsets You→ You feel an overwhelming urge to eat→ You eat more than you know you should.
Emotional hunger can’t be filled with food. Eating may feel good in the moment, but the feelings that triggered the eating are still there. And you often feel worse than you did before because of the unnecessary calories you’ve just consumed. You beat yourself up for messing up and not having more willpower.
Compounding the problem, you stop learning healthier ways to deal with your emotions, have a harder and harder time controlling your weight, and feel increasingly powerless over food and your feelings. But no matter how powerless you feel over food and your feelings, it is possible to make a positive change.
Do you feel this way?
I have many ways to show you how to understand this
You can learn healthier ways to deal with your emotions, avoid triggers, conquer cravings by replacing it with Self Development tools for stress, providing you with strategies to not only tackle it but acknowledge its patterning to relearn new ones that are more supportive for your wellbeing.
