What is emotional eating?
We don’t always eat just to satisfy physical hunger. Many of us turn to food for comfort, stress relief, or to reward ourselves. And when we do, we tend to reach for junk food, sweets, and other comforting but unhealthy foods. You might reach for chocolate when you’re feeling down, order a pizza if you’re bored or lonely, or swing by the drive-through after a stressful day at work.
Emotional eating is using food to make yourself feel better—to fill emotional needs, rather than your stomach. Unfortunately, emotional eating doesn’t fix emotional problems. In fact, it usually makes you feel worse. Afterwards, not only does the original emotional issue remain, but you also feel guilty for overeating.
Signs that you are an emotional eater
- You eat more when you feel stressed
- You eat when you’re not hungry or when you’re full
- You eat to feel better e.g. to calm or soothe yourself when you’re sad, bored or anxious
- You ‘reward’ yourself with food
- You regularly eat until you feel stuffed
- Food makes you feel ‘safe’ like a friend
- You feel powerless or out of control around food
The emotional eating cycle
Occasionally using food as a pick-me-up, a reward, or to celebrate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when eating is your primary emotional coping mechanism—when your first impulse is to open the fridge whenever you’re stressed, upset, angry, lonely, exhausted, or bored—you get stuck in an unhealthy cycle where the real feeling or problem is never addressed.
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 for messing up and not having more willpower.
Compounding the problem, you stop learning healthier ways to deal with your emotions, you have a harder and harder time controlling your weight, and you feel increasingly powerless over both food and your feelings. But no matter how powerless you feel over food and your feelings, it is possible to make a positive change. You can learn healthier ways to deal with your emotions, avoid triggers, conquer cravings, and finally put a stop to emotional eating.
The difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger
Before you can break free from the cycle of emotional eating, you first need to learn how to distinguish between emotional and physical hunger. This can be trickier than it sounds, especially if you regularly use food to deal with your feelings.
Emotional hunger can be powerful, so it’s easy to mistake it for physical hunger. But there are clues you can look for to help you tell physical and emotional hunger apart:
Emotional hunger comes on suddenly – it hits you in an instant and feels overwhelming and urgent. Physical hunger, on the other hand, comes on more gradually. The urge to eat doesn’t feel as dire or demand instant satisfaction (unless you haven’t eaten for a very long time).
Emotional hunger craves specific comfort foods – when you’re physically hungry, almost anything sounds good—including healthy stuff like vegetables. But emotional hunger craves junk food or sugary snacks that provide an instant rush. You feel like you need cake or pizza, and nothing else will do.
Emotional hunger often leads to mindless eating – before you know it, you’ve eaten a whole pack of biscuits or an entire tub of ice cream without really paying attention or fully enjoying it. When you’re eating in response to physical hunger, you’re typically more aware of what you’re doing.
Emotional hunger isn’t satisfied once you’re full – you keep wanting more and more, often eating until you’re uncomfortably stuffed. Physical hunger, on the other hand, doesn’t need to be stuffed. You feel satisfied when your stomach is full.
Emotional hunger isn’t located in the stomach – rather than a growling belly or a pang in your stomach, you feel your hunger as a craving you can’t get out of your head. You’re focused on specific textures, tastes, and smells.
Emotional hunger often leads to regret, guilt, or shame – when you eat to satisfy physical hunger, you’re unlikely to feel guilty or ashamed because you’re simply giving your body what it needs. If you feel guilty after you eat, it’s likely because you know deep down that you’re not eating for nutritional reasons.
| Emotional hunger vs. Physical hunger | |
| Emotional hunger comes on suddenly | Physical hunger comes on gradually |
| Emotional hunger feels like it needs to be satisfied instantly | Physical hunger can wait |
| Emotional hunger craves specific comfort foods | Physical hunger is open to options—lots of things sound good |
| Emotional hunger isn’t satisfied with a full stomach. | Physical hunger stops when you’re full |
| Emotional eating triggers feelings of guilt, powerlessness, and shame | Eating to satisfy physical hunger doesn’t make you feel bad about yourself |
Identify your emotional eating triggers
The first step in putting a stop to emotional eating is identifying your personal triggers. What situations, places, or feelings make you reach for the comfort of food? Most emotional eating is linked to unpleasant feelings, but it can also be triggered by positive emotions, such as rewarding yourself for achieving a goal or celebrating a holiday or happy event.
Common causes of emotional eating
Stress – ever notice how stress makes you hungry? It’s not just in your mind. When stress is chronic, as it so often is in our chaotic, fast-paced world, your body produces high levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol triggers cravings for salty, sweet, and fried foods—foods that give you a burst of energy and pleasure. The more uncontrolled stress in your life, the more likely you are to turn to food for emotional relief.
Stuffing emotions – eating can be a way to temporarily silence or “stuff down” uncomfortable emotions, including anger, fear, sadness, anxiety, loneliness, resentment, and shame. While you’re numbing yourself with food, you can avoid the difficult emotions you’d rather not feel.
Boredom or feelings of emptiness. Do you ever eat simply to give yourself something to do, to relieve boredom, or as a way to fill a void in your life? You feel unfulfilled and empty, and food is a way to occupy your mouth and your time. In the moment, it fills you up and distracts you from underlying feelings of purposelessness and dissatisfaction with your life.
Childhood habits – think back to your childhood memories of food. Did your parents reward good behaviour with ice cream, take you out for pizza for a treat, or give you a biscuit when you were feeling sad? These habits can often carry over into adulthood. Or your eating may be driven by nostalgia—for cherished memories of a time past.
Social influences – getting together with other people for a meal is a great way to relieve stress, but it can also lead to overeating. It’s easy to overindulge simply because the food is there or because everyone else is eating. You may also overeat in social situations out of nervousness. Or perhaps your family or circle of friends encourages you to overeat, and it’s easier to go along with the group.
Keep an emotional eating diary
Perhaps you recognised yourself in at least a few of the previous descriptions. But even so, you’ll want to get even more specific. One of the best ways to identify the patterns behind your emotional eating is to keep track with a food and mood diary.
Every time you overeat or feel compelled to reach for your comfort food, take a moment to figure out what triggered the urge. If you backtrack, you’ll usually find an upsetting event that kicked off the emotional eating cycle. Write it all down in your food and mood diary: what you ate (or wanted to eat), what happened to upset you, how you felt before you ate, what you felt as you were eating, and how you felt afterward.
Over time, you’ll see a pattern emerge. Maybe you always end up gorging yourself after spending time with a critical friend. Or perhaps you stress eat whenever you’re on a deadline or when you attend family functions. Once you identify your emotional eating triggers, the next step is identifying healthier ways to feed your feelings.
Find other ways to feed your feelings
If you don’t know how to manage your emotions in a way that doesn’t involve food, you won’t be able to control your eating habits for very long. Diets so often fail because they offer logical nutritional advice which only works if you have conscious control over your eating habits. It doesn’t work when emotions hijack the process, demanding an immediate payoff with food.
In order to stop emotional eating, you have to find other ways to fulfil yourself emotionally. It’s not enough to understand the cycle of emotional eating or even to understand your triggers, although that’s a huge first step. You need alternatives to food that you can turn to for emotional fulfilment.
Alternatives to emotional eating
If you’re depressed or lonely, call someone who always makes you feel better, play with your cat, or look at a favourite photo
If you’re anxious, expend your nervous energy by doing some exercise, squeezing a stress ball, or taking a brisk walk.
If you’re exhausted, treat yourself with a hot drink, take a bath, or wrap yourself in a warm blanket.
If you’re bored, read a good book, watch your favourite comedy series on TV or take yourself outdoors
Pause when cravings hit and check in with yourself
Most emotional eaters feel powerless over their food cravings. When the urge to eat hits, it’s all you can think about. You feel an almost unbearable tension that demands to be fed, right now! Because you’ve tried to resist in the past and failed, you believe that your willpower just isn’t up to it. But the truth is that you have more power over your cravings than you think.
Take 5 before you give in to a craving
Emotional eating tends to be automatic and virtually mindless. Before you even realize what you’re doing, you’ve reached for a tub of ice cream and polished off half of it. But if you can take a moment to pause and reflect when you’re hit with a craving, you give yourself the opportunity to make a different decision.
Can you put off eating for five minutes? Or just start with one minute. Don’t tell yourself you can’t give in to the craving; remember, the forbidden is extremely tempting. Just tell yourself to wait.
While you’re waiting, check in with yourself. How are you feeling? What’s going on emotionally? Even if you end up eating, you’ll have a better understanding of why you did it. This can help you set yourself up for a different response next time.
Learn to accept your feelings—even the bad ones
While it may seem that the core problem is that you’re powerless over food, emotional eating actually stems from feeling powerless over your emotions. You don’t feel capable of dealing with your feelings head on, so you avoid them with food.
Allowing yourself to feel uncomfortable emotions can be scary. You may fear that once you open the door you won’t be able to shut it. But the truth is that when we don’t obsess over or suppress our emotions, even the most painful and difficult feelings subside relatively quickly and lose their power to control our attention.
To do this you need to become mindful and learn how to stay connected to your moment-to-moment emotional experience. This can enable you to rein in stress and repair emotional problems that often trigger emotional eating.
Indulge without overeating by savouring your food
When you eat to feed your feelings, you tend to do so quickly, mindlessly consuming food on autopilot. You eat so fast you miss out on the different tastes and textures of your food—as well as your body’s cues that you’re full and no longer hungry. But by slowing down and savouring every bite, you’ll not only enjoy your food more but you’ll also be less likely to overeat.
Slowing down and enjoying your food is an important aspect of mindful eating, the opposite of mindless, emotional eating. Try taking a few deep breaths before starting your food, putting your utensils down between bites, and really focusing on the experience of eating. Pay attention to the textures, shapes, colours and smells. How does each mouthful taste? How does it make your body feel?
By slowing down in this way, you’ll find you appreciate each bite of food much more. You can even indulge in your favourite foods and feel full on much less. It takes time for the body’s fullness signal to reach your brain, so taking a few moments to consider how you feel after each bite—hungry or satiated—can help you avoid overeating.
Practice mindful eating
Eating while you’re also doing other things—such as watching TV, driving, or playing with your phone(!) can prevent you from fully enjoying your food. Since your mind is elsewhere, you may not feel satisfied or continue eating even though you’re no longer hungry. Eating more mindfully can help focus your mind on your food and the pleasure of a meal and curb overeating.
Support yourself with healthy lifestyle habits
When you’re physically strong, relaxed, and well rested, you’re better able to handle the curveballs that life inevitably throws your way. But when you’re already exhausted and overwhelmed, any little hiccup has the potential to send you off the rails and straight toward the refrigerator. Exercise, sleep, and other healthy lifestyle habits will help you get through difficult times without emotional eating.
- Make daily exercise a priority – physical activity is great for enhancing both your mood and your energy levels and it’s also a powerful stress reducer
- Aim for 8 hours of sleep every night – when you don’t get enough sleep, your body starts to crave sugary foods that will give you a quick energy boost. Getting plenty of rest will help with appetite control and reduce food cravings
- Make time for relaxation – give yourself permission to take at least 30 minutes every day to relax, decompress, and unwind. This is your time to take a break from your responsibilities and recharge your batteries
- Connect with others. Don’t underestimate the importance of close relationships and social activities. Spending time with positive people who enhance your life will help protect you from the negative effects of stress
Mindful Eating
Paying attention to the moment-to-moment experience of eating can help you improve your diet, manage food cravings, and even lose weight. Here’s how to start eating mindfully.
What is Mindful Eating?
Mindful eating is maintaining an in-the-moment awareness of the food and drink you put into your body. It involves observing how the food makes you feel and the signals your body sends about taste, satisfaction, and fullness. Mindful eating requires you to simply acknowledge and accept rather than judge the feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations you observe. It can extend to the process of buying, preparing, and serving your food as well as consuming it.
For many of us, our busy daily lives often make mealtimes rushed affairs. We find ourselves eating in the car, at the desk in front of a computer screen, or parked on the couch watching TV. We eat mindlessly, shovelling food down regardless of whether we’re still hungry or not. In fact, we often eat for reasons other than hunger—to satisfy emotional needs, to relieve stress, or cope with unpleasant emotions such as sadness, anxiety, loneliness, or boredom. Mindful eating is the opposite of this kind of unhealthy “mindless” eating.
Mindful eating isn’t about being perfect, always eating the right things, or never allowing yourself to eat on-the-go again. And it’s not about establishing strict rules for how many calories you can eat or which foods you have to include or avoid in your diet. Rather, it’s about focusing all your senses and being present as you shop for, cook, serve, and eat your food.
While mindfulness isn’t for everyone, many people find that by eating this way, even for just a few meals a week, you can become more attuned to your body. This can help you to avoid overeating, make it easier to change your dietary habits for the better, and enjoy the improved well-being that comes with a healthier diet.
Benefits of Mindful Eating
By paying close attention to how you feel as you eat—the texture and tastes of each mouthful, your body’s hunger and fullness signals, how different foods affect your energy and mood—you can learn to enjoy both your food and the experience of eating. Being mindful of the food you eat can promote better digestion, keep you full with less food, and influence wiser choices about what you eat in the future. It can also help you free yourself from unhealthy habits around food and eating.
Eating mindfully can help you to:
- Slow down and take a break from the hustle and bustle of your day, easing stress and anxiety
- Examine and change your relationship with food—helping you to notice when you turn to food for reasons other than hunger
- Derive greater pleasure from the food you eat, as you learn to slow down and more fully appreciate your meals and snacks
- Make healthier choices about what you eat by focusing on how each type of food makes you feel after eating it
- Improve your digestion by eating slower
- Feel fuller sooner and by eating less food
- Make a greater connection to where your food comes from, how it’s produced, and the journey it’s taken to your plate
- Eat in a healthier, more balanced way
How to Practice Mindful Eating
It’s important to eat with all your attention rather than on “automatic pilot” or while you’re reading, looking at your phone, watching TV, daydreaming, or planning what you’re doing later. When your attention strays, gently bring it back to your food and the experience of cooking, serving, and eating.
Try practicing mindful eating for short, five-minute periods at first and gradually build up from there. And remember: you can begin mindful eating when you’re making your shopping list or browsing the menu at a restaurant. Carefully assess each item you add to your list or choose from the menu.
- Start by taking a few deep breaths and considering the health value of each different piece of food. While nutrition experts continually debate exactly which foods are “healthy” and which are not, the best rule of thumb is to eat food that is as close as possible to the way nature made it
- Employ all your senses while you’re shopping, cooking, serving, and eating your food. How do different foods look, smell, and feel as you chop? How do they sound as they’re being cooked? How do they taste as you eat?
- Be curious and make observations about yourself, as well as the food you’re about to eat. Notice how you’re sitting, sit with good posture but remain relaxed. Acknowledge your surroundings but learn to tune them out. Focusing on what’s going on around you can distract you from the process of eating and take away from the mindfulness experience
- Tune into your hunger. How hungry are you? You want to come to the table when you’re hungry, but not ravenous after skipping meals. Know what your intentions are in eating this specific meal. Are you eating because you’re actually hungry or is it that you’re bored, need a distraction, or think it’s what you should be doing?
- With the food in front of you, take a moment to appreciate it—and any people you’re sharing the meal with—before eating. Pay attention to the textures, shapes, colours and smells of the food. What reactions do you have to the food, and how do the smells make you feel?
- Take a bite, and notice how it feels in your mouth. How would you describe the texture now? Try to identify all the ingredients, all the different flavours. Chew thoroughly and notice how you chew and what that feels like
- Focus on how your experience shifts moment to moment. Do you feel yourself getting full? Are you satisfied? Take your time, stay present and don’t rush the experience
- Put your utensils down between bites. Take time to consider how you feel—hungry, satiated—before picking up your utensils again. Listen to your stomach, not your plate. Know when you’re full and then stop eating
- Give gratitude and reflect on where this food came from, the plants or animals involved, and all the people it took to transport the food and bring it onto your plate. Being more mindful about the origins of our food can help us all make wiser and more sustainable choices
- Continue to eat slowly as you talk with your dining companions, paying close attention to your body’s signals of fullness. If eating alone, try to stay present to the experience of consuming the food
Fitting Mindful Eating Into Your Life
For most of us, it’s unrealistic to think we can be mindful for every bite or even for every meal we eat. The pressures of work and family sometimes mean you’re forced to eat on the go or have only a limited window to eat something or risk going hungry for the rest of the day. But even when you can’t adhere to a strict mindful eating practice, you can still avoid eating mindlessly and ignoring your body’s signals.
Perhaps you can take a few deep breaths before eating a meal or snack to quietly contemplate what you’re about to put into your body. Are you eating in response to hunger signals or are you eating in response to an emotional signal? Maybe you’re bored or anxious or lonely?
Similarly, are you eating food that is nutritionally healthy or are you eating food that is emotionally comforting? Even if you have to eat at your desk, for example, can you take a few moments to focus all your attention on your food, rather than multitasking or being distracted by your computer or phone?
Think of mindful eating like exercise: every little bit counts. The more you can do to slow down, focus solely on the process of eating, and listen to your body, the greater satisfaction you’ll experience from your food and the greater control you’ll have over what you eat.
| Making the switch from mindless to mindful eating | |
| Mindless Eating: | Mindful Eating: |
| Eating on autopilot or while multitasking (driving, working, reading, watching TV, etc.). | Focusing all your attention on your food and the experience of eating. |
| Eating to fill an emotional void (because you’re stressed, lonely, sad, or bored, for example). | Eating only to satisfy physical hunger. |
| Eating junk or comfort food. | Eating nutritionally healthy meals and snacks. |
| Eating food as quickly as possible. | Eating slowly, savouring every bite. |
| Eating until all the food has gone, ignoring your body’s signals of fullness. | Listening to your body’s signals and eating only until you’re full. |
Using mindfulness to explore your relationship with food
Whether you’re aware of it or not, food dramatically affects your wellbeing. It can affect the way you feel physically, how you respond emotionally, and how you manage mentally. It can boost your energy and outlook or it can drain your resources and make you feel sluggish, moody, and dispirited.
We all know what we should do but if simply knowing the “rules” of healthy eating was enough, none of us would be overweight or hooked on junk food. When you eat mindfully and become more attuned to your body, however, you can start to feel how different foods affect you physically, mentally, and emotionally. And that can make it much easier to make the switch to healthier food choices. For example, once you realize that the sugary snack you crave when you’re tired or depressed actually leaves you feeling even worse, it’s easier to manage those cravings and opt for a healthier snack that boosts your energy and mood instead.
Many of us only really pay attention to how food makes us feel when it causes us to be physically ill. The question we should be asking is not, “Does my food make me sick?” but rather, “How well does it make me feel?” In other words, how much better do you feel after eating? How much more energy and enthusiasm do you have after a meal or snack?
So, how does your food make you feel?
To fully explore your relationship with food, it’s important to become aware of how different foods make you feel. How do you feel after you swallow the food? How do you feel in five minutes, in an hour, or several hours after eating? How do you feel generally throughout the day?
To start tracking the relationship between what you eat and how it makes you feel, try the following exercise:
Tracking the link between food and feeling
- Eat in your usual way. Select the foods, amounts, and the times for eating that you normally do, only now add mindfulness to what you are doing
- Keep a record of all that you eat, including nibbles and snacks between meals. Don’t kid yourself—you won’t remember it all unless you write it all down or track it in an app!
- Pay attention to your feelings—physical and emotional—five minutes after you have eaten; one hour after you have eaten; two or three hours after you’ve eaten
- Notice if there has been a shift or change as the result of eating. Do you feel better or worse than before you ate? Do you feel energized or tired? Alert or sluggish?
Keeping a record on your phone or in a notebook can heighten your awareness of how the meals and snacks you eat affect your mood and wellbeing.
Experimenting with different food combinations
Once you’re able to connect your food choices to your physical and mental wellbeing, the process of selecting food becomes a matter of listening to your own body. For example, you may find that when you eat carbohydrates you feel heavy and lethargic for hours. Therefore, carb-heavy meals become something you try to avoid.
Of course, different foods affect us all differently, according to factors such as genetics and lifestyle. So it may involve some trial and error to find the foods and combinations of food that work best for you.
The following exercise can help you discover how different food combinations and quantities affect your well-being:
Mixing and matching different foods
- Begin to experiment with your food:
- Try eating less food more often, or less food full stop
- If you’re a meat-eater, spend two or three days excluding meat from your diet
- Or perhaps exclude red meat, but include chicken and fish
- Remove certain foods from your diet: salt, sugar, coffee, or bread, for example, and see how this affects how you feel
- Play with food combinations. Try eating solely starch meals, protein meals, fruit meals, fruit meals or vegetable meals.
- Keep a record of everything you observe in yourself as you experiment with your eating habits. The question you’re trying to answer is: “Which eating patterns enhance the quality of my life, and which detract?”
- Continue experimenting with different types, combinations, and amounts of food for two or three weeks, tracking how you feel mentally, physically, and emotionally.
Eating to Fill a Void vs. Eating to Improve Wellbeing
While eating undoubtedly affects how you feel, it’s also very true that how you feel affects what, when, and how much you eat. Many of us frequently mistake feelings of anxiety, stress, loneliness, or boredom for hunger pangs and use food in an attempt to cope with these feelings. The discomfort you feel reminds you that you want something, need something to fill a void in your life. That void could be a better relationship or a more fulfilling job. When you continually try to fill that void with food, though, you inevitably overlook your real hungers.
As you practice mindful eating and your awareness grows, you’ll become aware of how often your food consumption has nothing to do with physical hunger, and everything to do with filling an emotional need. As you sit down to eat, ask yourself, “What am I truly hungry for?” Are you craving that “little something to nibble on” because you’re genuinely hungry or for another reason?
Practicing mindful eating forces you to slow down, focus on the present moment, and notice what you’re really feeling. And when you repeatedly ask yourself, “How well do I feel after a meal or snack?” you’ll begin the process of gaining awareness of your own specific nutritional needs. You’ll measure meals and snacks in terms of how they affect your wellbeing. Your purpose for eating will shift from the intention of feeling full of food, to the intention of feeling full of energy and vitality.
Taking Deep Breaths Before You Eat
Breathing deeply can often help to pacify hunger, especially when that hunger really isn’t about food. Oxygen fuels the body and breathing deeply can increase your energy and sense of wellbeing. As you breathe deeply, you also relax and relieve stress and tension, common imitators of false hunger.
Pausing to Enjoy Your Food
Whenever you feel hungry, and before every meal, take ten slow, deep breaths.
- Reflect on what it is you really want. Ask yourself, “What is it that I’m really hungry for? Is it food? How hungry am I?”
- Continue to ask these questions throughout the meal