Battles with food and weight are torments that affect many people in today’s diet-crazy world. If you are part of the staggering 95 per cent of people who fail with their weight-loss attempts, it’s possible that emotional eating may be keeping you shackled to the frustrating cycle of weight loss and weight regain with a trail of unsuccessful dieting attempts behind you.
Due to the bombardment of messages we are exposed to in our society these days, with conflicting rules and information surrounding what we should and shouldn’t be eating, it’s easy to get swept up in focusing merely on food and exercise when undertaking a new weight-loss goal. There are “guilt-free” and “low-calorie” items in the supermarket aisles and an array of headlines in magazines that constantly scrutinise celebrities. One moment, pictures of stick-thin bodies are plastered on front covers and then photos of curvy stars appear with headlines such as “binging out of control”. A culture of dieting and preoccupation with food and weight have become normal parts of life.
It’s true that considering food is an important part of weight management and overall health. However, achieving successful weight loss is not just about what you are eating. It’s also crucial to address how and why you are eating. Often, at the very foundation of most weight battles, lie common clues, all leading to your relationship with food as the main culprit.
How you are eating
When anyone decides they want to lose excess weight nowadays, it’s more common than not that food restriction in some form occurs. Whether it’s cutting down on carbohydrates, counting calories or trying to avoid chocolate, the restrictive rules surrounding food take a person away from listening to their own internal hunger cues that tell them what, when and how much to eat. Rather, they rely on external cues or rules to tell them this.
A person’s mindset from the very beginning comes from a place of deprivation that often goes unidentified because of today’s general acceptance of rulebook dieting. When a person begins their weight-loss journey feeling deprived, it’s like a time bomb waiting to go off. It simply can’t be sustained. Thoughts often become focused the very thing that is being restricted, which in turn strengthens the desire for it. Telling yourself you can’t have something usually results in wanting it even more.
Before long, restrictive eating and feeling deprived leads to breaking the rules and overeating the very foods you feel you shouldn’t have. Where there are restrictive eating patterns, overeating is usually inevitable, whether it takes one week or six months. It becomes a hopeless cycle of restriction followed by overeating, followed by further restriction to compensate, and on it goes.
Why you are eating
When a person overeats, they are eating for reasons other than hunger. Whether it’s picking on a few bits of grated carrot or binging on an entire mudcake in one sitting, identifying and addressing the reasons for overeating is an important part of achieving successful long-term weight loss.
If you are eating in response to factors other than hunger, it has become widely accepted as emotional eating — ie eating in response to certain feelings rather than from physiological hunger cues. If you eat more when stressed, bored, tired, lonely, sad, glad or mad, it’s likely you are using food to manage these feelings. Food is being used as a way to escape those feelings and has become your drug of choice.
It’s also important to consider that it’s not always intense emotions that lead to overeating. On TV and in movies you see classic examples of the relationship break-up sparking the heartbroken woman to reach for the icecream container and eat herself through her misery. But not all emotional eating involves intense emotional states resulting from situations such as that.
Emotional eating includes even subtle experiences that people often overlook, such as boredom and loneliness, leaving them unaware they are eating due to reasons other than real hunger. This can leave a person at a loss as to why the weight they’ve lost keeps creeping back on or why their excess weight won’t budge at all.
What can happen is the urge to eat triggered by a particular feeling is identified as true hunger, yet what the person is experiencing is just an urge to eat with no real physical hunger present. When people learn how to differentiate between these two types of hunger and respond to emotions with positive, functional solutions, emotional eating can be managed and stopped, but this requires self-awareness and practice.
6 tips to conquer emotional eating
- Differentiate between physical and psychological hunger
- Identify patterns
- Identify triggers
- Identify what you are feeling
- Find alternative ways to cope with emotions that contribute to overeating
- Be patient with yourself
Physical hunger is detected from the stomach and usually builds up gradually. Sensations of emptiness, grumbling, gnawing or tightness can all be indicators you are hungry and need to eat. Psychological hunger is “head” hunger and often happens suddenly. You may experience an urge to eat without physical hunger present. Before eating, stop and identify if there are signs of hunger from the stomach.
When do you usually overeat? Are there times when you tend to reach for food more than at other times? Patterns such as overeating alone at night, while watching TV, at social gatherings involving food or because you feel you need to finish what’s on your plate may be clues to help you unfold patterns around emotional eating.
What is the difference in times when you overeat and times when you don’t? The patterns you find can be clues to help uncover your triggers for emotional eating. Triggers are high-risk situations, such as feeling angry or being invited out for dinner, that cause you to feel vulnerable to emotional eating and may have in the past led to overeating.
When you are experiencing an emotion, you may not even be aware of what it is you are feeling. Certain clues including thoughts, physical sensations and behaviors can help you identify what emotion is present. For example, anxiety could be identified from racing thoughts, dread or worry about something bad happening, inability to concentrate, nausea, racing heartbeat, trembling or feeling shaky, not able to sit still, fatigue or insomnia. Thinking back to what has happened during the day or what your thoughts are focused on can help determine your emotion.
Learning to cope without using food as a crutch is an important process in finally overcoming emotional eating. When a person eats due to emotional reasons rather than from real hunger, often they become more stressed because they are left feeling guilty, angry, helpless and/or shameful, which in turn can lead to more overeating. Better ways to cope may include resting if tired, calling a friend if lonely or learning to be comfortable by yourself. Finding things you are passionate about can create more meaning in your life rather than merely filling that emptiness with unnecessary calories. Make a plan with strategies to manage these emotions without using food.
Change is a process that involves relapse. Practise, practise, practise, but expect slip-ups. Rather than criticise yourself for slipping up, learn from the situation by reviewing your plan and being aware of what contributed to slipping up. Other people who have struggled with emotional eating have found that in hindsight there were red flags that led to relapsing.
Ask yourself what happened this time that led you to back to emotional eating? For example, if you felt low in mood during the day and are entering your high-risk time after dinner because of boredom or loneliness, you may need further strategies to manage feeling low or bored.
Eating a piece of cake does not make you gain weight. Overeating it does. It’s how and why you eat it that is keeping you bogged down in the weight wars, unable to achieve successful weight management. Emotional factors are often forgotten about when considering strategies for losing weight.
