How to Manage Your Emotional Eating for Weight Loss

If you’re reading this, know you’re not alone. Sometimes the strongest food cravings hit when you're at your weakest point emotionally. You may turn to food for comfort or as a coping mechanism — consciously or unconsciously — when facing a difficult problem, feeling stressed, or even feeling bored.

Emotional eating can really hinder your efforts when you’re on a weight loss journey. Your mindset is your biggest asset that manages how you handle situations, how you’re neurologically programmed, and how you manage your choices when you’re stressed. It often leads to eating too much — especially high-calorie, sweet, and fatty foods. The great news is that if you're prone to emotional eating, you can take steps to regain control of your habits, manage your behaviours, become more self aware, be more confident in your decisions, and have alternatives to dealing with stress.

What is emotional eating?
We don’t always eat just to satisfy physical hunger. Many of us also turn to food for comfort, as a stress relief, or to reward ourselves. And when we do, we tend to reach for junk food, sweets, and other comforting but unhealthy foods. If you’ve had a stressful day at work you may reach for a glass of wine. It’s all about recognising your behaviours and being more cognisant of how you handle stress. This blog post will help you understand more about emotional eating, whether it affects you, and ways in which you can overcome it.

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. Afterward, not only does the original emotional issue remain, but you also feel guilty for overeating.

Are you an emotional eater?
- Do you eat more when you're feeling stressed?
- Do you eat when you're not hungry or when you're full?
- Do you eat to feel better (to calm and soothe yourself when you're sad, mad, bored, anxious, etc.)?
- Do you reward yourself with food?
- Do you regularly eat until you've stuffed yourself?
- Does food make you feel safe? Do you feel like food is a friend?
- Do you feel powerless or out of control around food?

How your mood can affect your food and weight
Emotional eating is eating as a way to suppress or soothe negative emotions, such as stress, anger, fear, boredom, sadness, or loneliness. Major life events or, more commonly, the hassles of daily life can trigger negative emotions that lead to emotional eating and disrupt your weight-loss efforts. These triggers can be from a number of different reasons which might include:

• Relationship conflicts

• Work or financial pressures

• Fatigue, low energy

• Lifestyle choices

• Health problems

A prime personal example that you may relate to was the moment I left Singapore. I had spent eight years refining a routine and when I was home in the UK I found myself stressed and pretty emotional. I felt lost, my identity had shifted from someone who was super independent to living with her parents at 32. During this time I used food as a comfort. Chocolate and takeaways were the things I reached for. It became unhealthy and I realised I need to connect back to myself. I recognised the behaviours and the 7kg weight gain. 

Know that this is a place to maintain self compassion, kindness and self-acceptance. Once you have the awareness that change needs to happen, you can start taking steps to shift patterns of behaviour.

Your emotions can become so tied to your eating habits that you automatically reach for a treat whenever you're angry or stressed without thinking about what you're doing. Food also serves as a distraction. If you're worried about an upcoming event or stewing over a conflict, for instance, you may focus on eating instead of dealing with the painful situation.

Whatever emotions drive you to overeat, the end result is often the same. The effect is temporary, the emotions return and you likely then bear the additional burden of guilt about setting back your weight-loss goal. This can also lead to an unhealthy cycle — your emotions trigger you to overeat, you beat yourself up for getting off your weight-loss track, you feel bad and you overeat again.

Occasionally using food as a pick-me-up, a reward, or to celebrate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, if eating is your primary emotional coping mechanism, or if your first impulse is to open the refrigerator whenever you’re overstressed, upset, annoyed, heartbroken, angry, lonely, exhausted, or bored, you may get stuck in an unhealthy cycle where the real feeling or problem is never addressed.

This is a short term solution that helps you to 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.

No matter how powerless you feel over food and your feelings in the moment, 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.

How do you get back to a place where you are able to have different ways of coping?

When negative emotions threaten to trigger emotional eating, you can take steps to control it. To help stop emotional eating, try some of these tips to bring awareness to how you are feeling and what you need at that moment in time.

• Keep a food diary. Write down what you eat, how much you eat, when you eat, how you're feeling when you eat, and how hungry you are. Over time, you might see patterns that reveal the connection between mood and food. Are there dips in your days when your energy is low? Pay attention, identify it, and write it down.

• Tame your stress. Learn how to manage your stress. Try a stress management technique, such as yoga, meditation, or deep breathing.

• Have a hunger reality check. Is your hunger physical or emotional? If you ate just a few hours ago and don't have a rumbling stomach, you're probably not hungry. Give the craving time to pass. I like to use our technique at the Beyond Strong Method: Stop, Pause, Drink (water), Think. This creates some space and time to manage how you’re feeling.

• Get support. Learn to ask for help and lean on family and friends or consider joining a support group that you can connect with.

• Fight boredom. Instead of snacking when you're not hungry, distract yourself and substitute a healthier behavior. Take a walk, watch a movie, play with your pet, listen to music, read, surf the internet, or call a friend. Changing up your environment is important, and developing your understanding that boredom doesn’t need to revolve around food.

• Don't deprive yourself. When trying to lose weight, you might limit calories too much, eat the same foods repeatedly, and banish treats. This may just serve to increase your food cravings, especially in response to emotions. Eat satisfying amounts of healthier foods, enjoy an occasional treat, and get plenty of variety to help curb cravings.

• Snacks are healthy. If you feel the urge to eat between meals, opting for more satiating snacks high in protein will be great at keeping you fuller for longer. 

• Learn from setbacks. If you experience some emotional eating, forgive yourself, accept it, and start fresh the next day. Try to learn from the experience and make a plan for how you can prevent it in the future. Focus on the positive changes you're making in your eating habits and give yourself credit for making changes that'll lead to better health.

When to seek professional help

It’s important to know that you don’t have to manage this totally alone. If you've tried these self-help options but you still can't control your emotional eating, consider therapy with a mental health professional. Therapy is a great way to help you connect and understand yourself more as to why you eat emotionally and learn coping skills.

If you need support in your journey, accountability because you’re feeling you have an all or nothing approach then let’s connect and create a plan for more structure in your life to achieve your goals! Enquire for 1-1 personalised online coaching at Beyond Strong

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