What Is Emotional Eating – How To Stop Negative Habits
Written by: Kamini Wood, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
We sometimes turn to food for comfort when we feel stressed and overwhelmed. How many times have you used food to make yourself feel better emotionally?
Emotional eating doesn’t involve physical hunger but reaching for food in response to negative emotions. Sometimes, when something upsetting happens to us, we turn to food for relief and eat more than we should. This causes us to feel guilty for overeating.
However, out-of-control eating doesn’t solve your emotional problems. It makes them only worse because it adds feelings of guilt and shame for excessive eating to your existing issues.
What causes emotional eating?
While occasionally using food as comfort is not necessarily harmful, when you use food as your coping strategy, you only make things worse – you get trapped with unhealthy coping strategies without acknowledging the disturbing emotions or addressing the problem.
Stress is one of the most common causes of emotional eating. Many people experience hunger when they feel stressed. This is because stress causes our bodies to produce cortisol, the stress hormone. Cortisol makes you crave foods such as sweet, fried, and salty foods that upsurge energy. So, when you experience ongoing stress, you are more likely to turn to food for emotional comfort.
We may also reach out for emotional eating when we don’t know how to handle or express intense emotions like anger, sadness, loneliness, or fear. Many people try to suppress these powerful negative feelings by knocking themselves out with excessive amounts of food.
We may also engage in emotional eating when we feel nervous, bored, hopeless, or unhappy. Unfortunately, overeating doesn’t make these negative emotions go away. Emotional eating only escalates your problem. You may become sad about your helplessness to control your weight and your powerlessness over your feelings.
However, you can learn strategies to cope with your emotions and stop the negative habit.
How to put an end to negative eating habits?
The first step in overcoming emotional eating is recognizing the triggers that make you feel so bad. These may involve places, situations, people, emotions, or thoughts that we find disturbing.
Journaling can be a great strategy to identify these triggers and keep track of patterns behind emotional eating. Once you identify emotional triggers for out-of-control eating, you’ll feel empowered to find healthy strategies for managing your emotions.
Writing down your thoughts and emotions without auto-censuring them is an excellent way to make connections between your thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
Journaling allows you to get in touch with your subconscious mind, increasing the awareness of your negative self-talk and hurtful feelings. Emotional eating may cause you to beat yourself up for not having the willpower to refuse food. Journaling can help you recognize these self-critical thoughts and let go of self-judgment.
Emotional eating doesn’t solve personal issues. Learning to accept your feelings instead of suppressing them. Try practicing mindfulness to become more aware of your emotions and learn how to stay connected to your existing emotional experience. This can boost your resilience and help solve problems that trigger negative eating habits.
Kamini Wood, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Kamini Wood is the founder and CEO of Live Joy Your Way and the AuthenticMe® RiseUp program. An international best-selling author Kamini is driven to support people of all ages to heal their relationship with themselves and to stop outsourcing their self-worth. As a result, her clients become their own confident, resilient self-leader with healthier relationships. Kamini is a certified life coach, board-certified by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners, holds specialty certifications in Calling in the One®, Conscious Uncoupling®, NewMoney Story®, and teen life coaching. Also trained in conscious parenting, Kamini aims to meet her clients where they are, supporting and guiding them on their journey to where they want to be, both personally and professionally. Her mission: create space for each person to see the unique gifts they bring to this world.
