CONQUER EMOTIONAL EATING

I’m not saying you have a problem with emotional eating. But if you do, I’d like to help, since it’s one of the most formidable barriers to achieving lasting weight loss. On a personal level, this is a topic close to my heart because my own life includes an epic journey to combat and eventually overcome my own emotional eating challenges—and I’m positive that if I can reform my habits (because I was in pretty deep!), you can too.

Emotional eating, defined as a tendency to eat in response to negative emotions, is correlated with BMI, waist circumference and body-fat percentage in both women and men. Evidence indicates that emotional eating accounts for at least some of the association between depression and weight gain, and the association of depression with increased snacking and consumption of sweet, energy-dense foods. In a sample of Dutch adults, emotional eating was a stronger predictor of a person becoming overweight than overeating in response to external food-related cues, such as the sight and smell of attractive food. Furthermore, evidence that emotional eating has dramatically increased among adults moved some obesity experts to propose, “Perhaps we should try to explain the current obesity epidemic from an emotion perspective.”

Emotional eating has been shown to be particularly prevalent in obese adults, people with eating disorders and “restrained eaters” (frequent dieters or those who attempt to control their food intake as a means of body-weight control).

It’s not clear exactly why some people eat in response to unpleasant emotions while others do not, but potential causes include the inability to differentiate between hunger and emotional distress; the desirability of food to distract from, numb or lessen an emotion; and the potential for eating to temporarily allow one to escape from a distressing state of self-awareness.

Avoiding all negative emotion isn’t possible, but just because life’s challenges aren’t going anywhere doesn’t mean that emotional eaters are stuck with maladaptive habits. Quite the opposite. Just as someone can adopt a new habit of eating more vegetables or going to the gym at any age, someone with the habit of eating in response to emotion can also change completely. A person’s life doesn’t have to become picture-perfect and idyllic for them to defeat emotional eating. After all, it’s not the emotions that cause problems, but the way in which negative emotions are dealt with.

WHAT CONTRIBUTES TO EMOTIONAL EATING?

Inability to Separate Hunger and Emotion

Emotional eating isn’t an instinct with which we are born; it is learned, possibly from a very young age. Children who spend greater amounts of time eating while watching TV or playing video games are more prone to becoming emotional eaters, likely because mindless eating is characterized by inattention to hunger and satiety cues. Over time, it is possible to have difficulty identifying these states accurately, as well as differentiating them from other aroused states, such as times of heightened emotion.

Sensations of hunger and satiety also blur when they are ignored in efforts to control calories and lose weight. Focusing on following diet programs, meal plans or counting calories all detract from a person’s ability to tell when they are hungry, when they are satisfied and how these sensations feel different to experience than emotions. So, if you’ve been dieting for decades, it’s completely understandable to have a harder time discerning emotional stimuli from physical signals like hunger. If you’ve been consistently practicing Hunger Mastery for a while, you have likely made immense progress in feeling and recognizing hunger—yet long-standing habits of eating in response to stress or sadness don’t just vaporize on their own.

Emotional Suppression

Environmental factors such as culture, parental discipline, abuse or trauma can cause people at any age to learn to suppress their feelings as a coping strategy. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4 defines suppression as “a defense mechanism in which a person intentionally avoids thinking about disturbing problems, desires, feelings or experiences.” Suppression of emotions is a type of emotional regulation. However, unlike adaptive methods of handling emotion, suppression is linked with unfavorable outcomes, such as increased tendency toward depression, anxiety and poor physical health. Emotional suppression is linked to earlier death as well as increased risk of cardiovascular disease, hypertension and cancer.

RESEARCH STUDIES HAVE SHOWN THAT PEOPLE WHO HABITUALLY SUPPRESS EMOTIONS EAT MORE DURING EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES THAN THOSE WHO DO NOT, PARTICULARLY COMFORT FOODS HIGH IN FAT AND SUGAR.

Research studies have shown that people who habitually suppress emotions eat more during emotional experiences than those who do not, particularly comfort foods high in fat and sugar. Furthermore, people who are instructed by researchers to suppress emotions in an experimentally induced emotional state also increase food intake compared to those who are instructed to reappraise the stimulus or those who are given no instruction at all. Interestingly, the intensity of emotion makes no difference in whether someone turns to food or not. It’s not how sad a person feels about a particular event that determines if they eat in response, it’s what they do with the sadness.

Other Factors

Studies have found that emotional eating is more prevalent among people who employ rigid dietary restraint and dichotomous (“black or white”) thinking. Alexithymia, difficulty with identifying and verbalizing emotions, is strongly correlated with emotional eating, disordered eating and obesity. It has been suggested that alexithymic people prefer to act rather than talk about their emotions, and eating can be a convenient and accessible way to act on emotion. Psychological inflexibility, the unwillingness to experience certain negative experiences, is also commonly associated with emotional eating as well as other maladaptive coping strategies.

WHAT CAN BE DONE

Separate Hunger and Emotion

One of the earliest habits in this system got you started on building your skills at sensing hunger. Hopefully, the weeks you spent tuning in to physiological hunger have gotten you more acquainted with what hunger feels like, and the specific nuances of how hunger is a different experience than an emotionally heightened state. Differentiating between the two is critical, and a necessary step in the process of learning to meet the actual need you are having at a given moment and not mistake it for another one.

If you still feel like you’ve got work to do in this area, though, don’t worry. You’ve got time, and luckily every day provides several opportunities to tune in and feel hunger. Each day also provides a rich experience of different emotions, some of which may be gentle and some of which may be strong. I invite you to observe your emotions as they come and go just as you’ve been practicing observing and experiencing hunger. This is a powerful step in breaking a conditioned pattern of emotional suppression. Allow yourself to feel. Ask yourself during the day, “How am I feeling?” and try to use a word besides good, bad or fine. Are you excited, eager, content, bored, lonely or anxious? Can you sense little bit of two or three different feelings at the same time?

As you observe your emotions, you may find yourself wondering, “What do I do with this feeling?” There is no single answer, but there are several helpful practices that I share with my clients to develop a set of healthy emotional skills and break away from eating as an emotion-regulation strategy.

Just Feel It

For a moment, consider that you might not have to do anything at all. If you’ve lived for decades under the assumption that you should act when you get an unpleasant emotion to make it go away, this might be a shocking suggestion: you do not need to fix it. No harm comes from just allowing yourself to feel a feeling. You don’t have to do a thing. Emotions are powerless to harm you. In fact, allowing yourself to welcome and feel the way you do might be the most expedient path to feeling better.

Taking a mind-set of acceptance and non-judgment can make this easier. That means not judging your emotional state as invalid, silly or wrong. It also means not trying to force it into a particular mold by analyzing or justifying it.

How many times have you believed that a feeling or thought you were having was silly, stupid, childish or just plain wrong? For example, it’s easy to feel like it’s wrong to be angry with someone we love, and to suppress it, deny it and put on a happy face when we actually are kind of steamed. However, anger is a natural and healthy thing to feel, and it can help us open our mouths and ask for different behavior in the future or an apology. Suppressing it in silence can lead to passive aggression or resentment that seethes under the surface. It’s much healthier to let yourself feel it, observe it and decide what you want to do, rather than denying that your anger exists. Even saying, “I notice I’m feeling angry,” is a great place to start!

Note that allowing yourself to feel your emotions doesn’t mean wallowing or clinging to them. It is quite possible to make yourself feel worse if you stew over a negative emotional experience, replay it in your mind like a video or retell the story to 30 other people (effectively reliving it yourself). Thinking a lot about your emotion, reinforcing it with “should” statements, labeling people or behaviors as “right” or “wrong” may all prolong and heighten your experience of feeling lousy. Instead, consider just observing the way you feel, acknowledging it as valid and going on with your day. If it stays with you, fine, but if it vaporizes, that’s fine too. Typically, letting yourself freely feel something makes it lighter immediately and over hours and days it may ebb and flow again or just drift off completely.

Learn to Reappraise Instead of Suppress

I mentioned in an earlier section how suppressing one’s feelings is a self-protective way to deal with them, but that it is associated with many negative outcomes, just one of which is an increased likelihood of engaging in emotional eating. Other types of emotional regulation, such as reappraisal, lead to healthier outcomes than suppression. Reappraisal means changing the way you think about an emotional situation to alter its emotional impact. For example, you can reappraise an unforeseen work obstacle as a chance to show your work ethic, thus lessening the frustration and negative feelings you experience. People who predominantly use suppression to regulate their emotions have been shown to increase food intake in an emotional state, while those who use cognitive reappraisal are less prone to emotional eating.

To try this one out, try to think of stimuli that bother you in a new way. I’m not saying lie to yourself; think of framing it in a way that is still true but less upsetting. You may have neglected to see the positive elements of some change, such as, “Although this was my second-choice position, it is a shorter commute and the benefits are equally good.” You may also be able to reappraise a disappointment by revising your expectations. If you have unfairly rigid expectations of yourself (such as perfection) that lead to you being chronically disappointed, reappraising your imperfections can help you see them as human and harmless, not the end of the world. “I made two typos on a 94-page document, that’s better than most people could do, and I did a thorough job. That’s why we have an editor anyway.”

While the topic may seem tangential for a weight-loss program, I’ve learned how incredibly beneficial it is with my personal coaching clients to help them develop healthy, realistic expectations of themselves, other people and the world. It leads to a lot less disappointment, strife and frustration in life. Lower levels of those feelings sure make it easier to consistently practice healthy habits too!

Strengthen Distress Tolerance

Many people who have struggled with emotional eating or other maladaptive coping skills have a sense of urgency when they get upset. They want to flee or do something drastic to change the situation now. Building resilience helps a person trust that they can manage uncomfortable sensations (emotional or physical) and be less upset by them.

You don’t have to go out of your way to create discomfort solely for this purpose, just bear in mind that when life hands you the inevitable challenge, it is an opportunity to prove and strengthen your resilience. You can handle it. It might not be easy, it might not be fun, but you can do hard things.

Whether you are in physical discomfort or emotional pain, one powerful strategy to get through it calmly is to become totally present. To do that, you’ll tune in to the current moment only. Situations which feel intolerable or excruciating are often so distressing because we are getting ahead of ourselves with worry or fear about the future, when right this moment actually isn’t so bad. In this very moment, there is often no problem at all; it’s dipping into the past to feel regret or shame or anger that heightens our suffering, or venturing ahead into the future that causes us worry or fear. When you find yourself feeling upset or even just a little uneasy, come back to this very moment.

Practice Flexible Dietary Restraint

Rigid dietary control is associated with increased emotional eating, binge eating and disinhibition (overeating). On the other hand, flexible dietary restraint is correlated with lower BMI and greater success with long-term weight maintenance. Rigid control is characterized by all-or-nothing thinking, forbidding certain foods, calorie counting and meal skipping. Flexible dietary control is characterized by moderating the frequency and portion of certain foods, enjoying a variety of foods and allowing your calorie intake to vary naturally from day to day.

WHERE TO START

Early habits you learned in this book have given you a head start in building the skills necessary for ending emotional eating. Hunger Mastery has helped you become more familiar with true hunger and how it is a different sensation from what emotions feel like. Observing your treats intake and allowing for your favorite foods in appropriate quantities is a form of flexibly controlling your intake without rigid abstinence.

What I’ll ask you to do next that is new is to practice sensing your emotions, accepting them and letting yourself feel them. Doing this for just a moment before each time you eat means at least three practice sessions a day are automatically built in to your life, but the benefits only increase if you do it more often, so feel free to practice it anytime. Especially if you get a sudden overwhelming urge to inhale a whole row of Oreos, it’s a great time to check in and ask yourself what you’re feeling.

I spotted this note posted in our client forum recently which shows what a game-changer this habit can be:

“I’m sure I’m not the only person in here who has previously eaten her feelings away when they are of the uncomfortable variety. Just as an FYI, yesterday I had extreme emotional discomfort—like, completely labile and on the edge of tears and just feeling like a miserable human over something(s) very trivial, but still, feelings aren’t logical sometimes.

For the first time I can remember, I didn’t do anything to distract myself from the discomfort. I didn’t eat, I didn’t read, I didn’t watch TV, I didn’t get on the computer. I just sat and FELT. It was very, very, VERY uncomfortable. I went to work, still on the verge of tears, sure I was going to be a basket case all day.

But you know what? They just … WENT AWAY. I didn’t have to DO anything to make that happen. I’m not sure where I read it, but I know somewhere Georgie said something to the effect that you don’t have to do anything when you have a bad feeling, you can just quietly sit there and experience it. Like hunger, it won’t kill you to have it.

And she’s right. Georgie Fear, you’re freakin’ brilliant. Thanks.”

WHERE YOU CAN GO NEXT

As you can tell from this chapter, there are many steps and skills to be acquired in beating emotional eating. The “assigned habit” of learning to identify, allow and accept your emotions is a great step to start with, and you may find it creates a ripple effect of other positive changes in your emotional wellness.

Among the payoffs that follow, you may find yourself relieved to finally have options for what to do when you have strong emotions. They are not in control of you; you are choosing your response. You can choose to take no outward action and just experience your feelings (knowing that they are harmless and temporary), or there may be an appropriate response such as speaking up if you disagree, getting water if you’re thirsty, apologizing if you’ve wronged someone or just getting out of the house and taking a walk in the fresh air if you’re restless. Regardless of whether you choose to take action or not, you’ll be leagues ahead of the days when you denied the emotion existed at all or tried to stuff it down or numb it with food.

A BIT OF MY STORY

Had there been a competition, I would have won titles for emotional suppression not too long ago. Any negative emotions that I didn’t suppress I immediately tried to escape. I used obsessive dieting and compulsive exercise to escape sometimes, and at other times I just ate lots and lots of cookies. Emotional overeating and undereating are two heads on the same beast for many people; they may seem like opposites, but both are efforts to manipulate or control your emotional state through food. I made it almost three decades on this planet without allowing myself to feel anger, to disagree with anyone I loved or to speak my mind if there was the slightest chance of being met with disapproval. I didn’t rock the boat, but sometimes I tried to eat my way out of it.

In other words, I know how easy it to not even know you are suppressing things. I had no clue. I thought I was just a really nice, accommodating person! No one else will tell you (because they can’t know) that you are suppressing your feelings all day long. And they sure won’t complain about how easy you are to get along with. I might never have changed if my health hadn’t fallen apart. What started as a curious tendency toward getting queasy became a clear pattern: difficult conversations were immediately followed by bouts of nausea. When I agreed to go somewhere I didn’t want to, I got nauseous. When I got blamed for things unfairly, I got nauseated. When someone made an insensitive or racist comment, the nausea would almost bring me to the ground. As much as I didn’t like it, I saw what it was. It was making me sick to deny the fact that I had an opinion, and if I never let my own feelings appear on my decision-making radar it would never change. I spent thousands of dollars on medical treatments trying to cure a problem that I was actually causing.

The best thing about learning you are the cause of all your own problems is that you hold the key to fixing them all. After you stop kicking yourself, I have found, it’s quite empowering. I started with the very habit assignment I gave you in this chapter, that three times a day I would ask myself what I was feeling. It was slow going at first, like trying to speak a language in which you know only a dozen words, but I got better at it the more I practiced. From there, changes in my life started to unfold naturally (and the nausea finally went away). I hope for you the process also flows; as you gather positive momentum, you feel better and better, and food becomes just food, not a coping mechanism.

Once you let yourself feel your feelings, the next step is to honor them. Speak up, express yourself, defend yourself, take care of your own needs and say no if you are too tired or overextended to accept a commitment. While this can feel risky or scary the first few times, tune in to the outcomes and you’ll see: no one minds. You won’t become a social outcast; in fact, you may earn more respect for expressing your authentic self. People will often approve of you more when you stop fearing their disapproval and just relax.

Discovering that the world actually accepts you as your authentic self is comforting beyond words. Suddenly, dozens of cookies did not have to give their lives to get me through the week. I felt more at ease, less anxious and, surprisingly, considerably less obsessed with controlling my weight or food intake. Saying no once in a while diffused my undercurrent of resentment and martyrdom. If you’ve ever been halfway through a pint of ice cream and found yourself wishing others could see how hard your life is (like the camera atop the helmet of a snowboarder) because then they would understand, you might benefit from saying no a bit more. No one is watching. No one is giving you points for making yourself suffer. Shoving food in our mouths while we’re standing at the sink after a hard day or week is an ineffective way of flipping the bird to the world for how cruel it’s being to us.

Kicking emotional eating is hard, but the dividends it pays off are far reaching and don’t stop at a leaner physique.

Written by Georgie Fear in "Lean Habits For Lifelong Weight Loss", Page Street Publishing, USA, 2015, excerpts chapter 14. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.