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What is Emotional Eating?
Emotional eating means feeding your emotions and not your stomach. It’s no revelation that an emotional eater will eat when stressed. Not just stress, even positive emotions can influence appetite and food choices. Comfort foods are a real thing. Happiness, excitement, sadness, all change how you feel and behave with food. Food then ceases to be the fuel it was meant to be and becomes a dysfunctional pattern of behavior with no more primary purpose of nourishment. We are too consumed by food (surprisingly it’s not the other way round) Our foods and moods are deeply interconnected.
“Food ought to fill an empty stomach. Not an empty heart. No amount or variety of food can fill the hollowness of dejection and rejection.”
What are the Signs of Emotional Food Intake?
Everyone has different adaptations and expressions of emotional eating. Let’s see what you might fit into. Here are 6 signs to watch out for.
Eating Without Hunger
This is the most tell-tale indication and should signal you to become more aware of your food blackout as if you’re not conscious anymore of your food intake. We don’t eat just to live; we eat because we enjoy food. But eating without hunger, or at a time when you should be feeling full, is a sign of emotions fueling your appetite. You might also observe that no matter how much you eat, you don’t seem to feel full. It often happens when we’re under stress. Food is unrelated to hunger anymore. And has everything to do with how you feel.
Preoccupation with Food
You might keep thinking about food, ruminating over how it would taste and the satisfaction you are likely to get when you eat it. This does sound like a sentiment that might seem normal a few hours before you reach your favorite restaurant too. The anticipatory excitement there is warranted. But emotional eating is more than that. When you are so preoccupied, you cease to focus on the task at hand, maybe are unable to work too, and food thoughts become obsessive, intrusive and unwanted.
When Food = Happiness
Food and happiness do have an obvious correlation. It’s OK to feel happy when you eat your favorite dish, but when eating becomes the only source of happiness, it might qualify as unreasonable or irrational. By repeatedly making food your happiness source, you train the brain to release dopamine (the happiness chemical) only when you eat. Eating thus becomes like an addiction. You know it doesn’t serve any positive purpose, is rather counterproductive, but it makes you happy for the moment
Cannot Stop (Bingeing)
Satiety or food satisfaction is described as a feeling of fullness, and is an internal cue for stopping eating. Also, alongside, is the decision to not overeat in order to stay in shape and be disciplined (with occasional exceptions of course). When you’re emotionally eating, you are unable to stop even though your stomach is revolting, it’s breaking your dietary discipline and might be clearly and obviously socially inappropriate. Binge eating (also seen in bulimia) is serious because it can be physically uncomfortable too.
Putting on Weight
You could be overweight for several reasons but if you’re upset about your body shape because of how you eat, and are still unable to manage food discipline, stress eating might be the culprit. Oftentimes this is a self-perpetuating vicious cycle. Excess weight stirs negative emotions along with body shaming, which further demotivates your dietary discipline. And if this leads to more weight gain, the cycle repeats with vengeance. Both remain out of control then, emotions as well as eating. The scuffle never ends.
Being Emotional About Eating
Barring those rare moments when you over eat because the food was really tasty, excessive eating tends to arouse guilt, frustration, annoyance, sadness and anger too. When you use emotionally charged words like ecstatic, sinful, addictive, craving, unusual, eccentric, disgusting, evil, shameful and the like, to describe your mental state after eating; it is likely that strong emotions are at play. It’s alright to like food, but it’s not OK when it takes control over your character description too.
If an emotional food binge resolved the primary emotional problem, it would be great. Food would be a substitute for an antidepressant. And later we could just exercise a bit and shed off the extra weight. But unfortunately, none of that ever happens. You need to deal with the primary problem. The food is just a pawn in the equation.
You’re the player in the game, and you’re losing. The trigger stays unknown, the stress remains unaddressed, you get upset about being overweight, and the emotional dependency on food becomes disruptive. It leads to time lost with preoccupation, losing out on work and social relationships and the whole gamut of self-destruction – physically, emotionally and socially. Your body will stay strong and resilient only as long as you care for it and nourish it right. Take the right steps to quit emotional eating now.
Stress is just another emotion that needs mature, and responsible handling. Food is not its solution. By adding it to the already distressed equation, you are further enhancing the problem.
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