Emotional Eating
Emotional eating is eating large quantities of “comfort” foods in response to feelings rather than to physical hunger.
There is nothing wrong when food is one of many ways to feel comforted. For example, if sometimes you feel like talking to a friend, another time like going for a walk, having a bath, listening to music, reading a book, meditating or having something delicious and comforting although you’re not physically hungry - it’s all good! Food does not only serve as a source of energy. It has social, cultural and yes, emotional roles.
Emotional eating becomes an issue when it’s the only way to deal with whatever may be going on, as this more often than not leads to loss of control, binge episodes and guilt.
The root cause of emotional hunger is usually deprivation from certain foods, by labelling them as bad / unhealthy / fattening and banning them from the “allowed” food list. A common excuse for excluding foods is “it doesn’t make me feel great”. Although this may be a perfectly valid reason for some people, it is often abused purely because of having a bad relationship with a particular food.
So how to get out of this vicious dieting and bingeing cycle? Most of us know that it is not as simple as telling yourself to break the cycle, as it takes time and constant effort to change the habits formed by diet culture, which many have been engaging in for decades.
Here are some tips on how to break the bingeing and purging cycle:
Give yourself time
Don’t be hard on yourself. Remember, it’s 2 steps forward, 1 step back. It is unrealistic to expect to only move forward. There are always setbacks in life and learning to eat intuitively is not any different.
Don’t skip meals
When you think you should skip the next meal because “you already ate too much today” or skip breakfast tomorrow because you had “such a big dinner”, instead of giving in to the devil called the diet culture, promise yourself to never skip meals or compromise them in terms of energy. It’s perfectly normal if it’s scary and you think you shouldn’t be eating but having regular meals will keep your blood sugar balanced, which will lessen the likelihood of intense cravings.
Also, skipping meals and not eating enough in general results in a slower metabolism. This occurs because your body adjusts to the amount of food available, so that you can survive when food is scarce.
A personal note to this - when I had a terrible relationship with food, I used to skip breakfast if I ate out for dinner and have way too little food throughout the day, because I wanted to “make up for it”. It was all too familiar when evening came and I could not stop eating after dinner, losing control around food and repeating the same story the next day. Promising myself to never skip or “make up” for food was one of the main factors that helped heal my relationship with food and with myself.
Stop “making up for it” with exercise
The above also applies to “making up for it” in the gym. Listen to your body and how it wants to move on a particular day. Punishing yourself with crazy workouts that leave you exhausted can lead to over-training, which ironically makes your body hold on to fat, rather than burn it. This is due to the increase in the stress hormone cortisol, as your body does not understand whether you have to keep sprinting from a tiger or you’re just doing a long HIIT workout or lifting heavy weights for 2h. 30-45min of movement per day is perfectly enough.
Be curious
It is frightening to give yourself an unconditional permission to eat, but you have to keep reminding yourself that there is no wagon / track to fall off of. Be curious and purposefully try foods you’ve been depriving yourself from. If it seems too scary in the beginning, set yourself attainable challenges. For example, one week set yourself a challenge to have pasta. Next week ice cream, etc.
You might be thinking “well this is just going to trigger me and I’m going to be eating junk 24/7”. I promise this won’t happen or at least it won’t last. Try have a doughnut or your favourite chocolate or (insert whatever you’re craving) all day every day and you’ll be sick of it before you know it. This phenomenon is called decreasing marginal utility. The more you have it the less you want it and when you know you have it any time, there is no intense need to have all of it right now.
Challenge your food critic
This is one of the principles of intuitive eating, which encourages you to become conscious of how you’re speaking to yourself when it comes to food. Instead of being judgmental, reflect and observe where are your thoughts stemming from. Often it is related to what diet culture has taught you: labelling foods as bad and avoiding them, commenting on your willpower or predisposing yourself to negative feelings, e.g. “I’m going to not feel great / feel guilty if I have this”. Instead of giving in to such thoughts, silence them by replacing with positive affirmations.
Challenge your body critic
Nothing in nature is constant. Things always change and so does your body. Throughout the day and throughout life. Stop trying to fight nature and accept that some days you will be bloated and feeling meh. Similarly, understand that physiologically it is unrealistic for most to look like your 16-year old self forever and it is even more unrealistic to look like someone else, especially a photoshopped version of them. Say a couple of kind things to your body every time you look in the mirror. When you don’t like a photo - compliment your body, instead of rushing to delete the picture.
Stop focusing on calories / macros
Your relationship with food and your body won’t heal if you keep counting calories or carbs. Regarding calories - your body has its own internal calculator and when it receives enough energy it signals that you’re full. No need to count for it. Some days you’ll need more calories than others, so don’t expect your appetite to be the same all the time.
Regarding macros - protein, fat and carbs all exist, because we need them all. If we didn’t, nature would have done the elimination for us. So be humble and stop thinking you’re smarter than nature. Your body is nature and it knows it all without you having to rationalise and create rules.
Have a mindfulness practice
Practicing mindfulness may sound unrelated to healing your relationship with food, but the two are interlinked. It has been shown in literature, that due to the increased awareness of self and of internal cues, mindfulness-based approaches reduce binge eating, emotional eating and eating in response to external cues.
I can personally attest to this, as meditation and reflective practice have helped me enormously not only regarding food and exercise, but on a much wider scope. It has positively impacted my personality in a way that I am a lot less affected by external factors, more emotionally resilient and more positive overall.
