Introduction to Emotional Eating Strategies Emotional eating strategies refer to techniques used to help individuals who find themselves turning to food for comfort rather than for nourishment, and these are developed over time in order to heal this way of coping. In fact, emotional eating is when we eat because we want to reduce uncomfortable emotions, rather than from physical hunger, and it can lead to overeating and guilt. Learning how to differentiate between emotional and physical hunger, recognizing triggers, and turning to healthier coping mechanisms can disrupt the cycle. Using concrete strategies—like tracking your emotional eating, planning meals, or picking stress-busting foods—you can take back the reins and get to the bottom of what’s causing your emotional eating.
What are Emotional Eating Strategies?
But emotional eating can catch up with us sometimes when we’re not actually feeling physical hunger, but just wanting to satiate our craving for comfort after a long and grueling day at the office. When we’re feeling sad, bored, lonely, or any combination of those feelings, it’s easy to reach for junk food or unhealthy foods like ice cream and pizza. The drive-through lane, even more often, becomes the easy choice during those stressful moments, offering that quick reward that will somehow help relieve the stress, at least for a few moments. Yet, treating ourselves to sweets or rich foods doesn’t really address our emotional needs or resolve our emotional issues. Rather than feeling better, this kind of eating can leave us feeling worse than we were before, physically full yet, at times, leaving behind guilt or, above all, overeating. Emotional eating is, at its heart, a distraction from the initial emotional problem — but it often only makes it feel worse.
Are you an emotional eater?
If you notice that you’re turning to food when you’re not hungry but rather need to vent stress, anger, or boredom, you might be an emotional eater. People often eat in these situations to make themselves feel better, believing the simple act of eating will act as a balm to soothe or calm feelings of sadness or anxiety, for example. It might seem like a comforting reward as if food is a safe friend that’s always there to support you. Yet these restrictions usually result in eating routinely even when you’ve reached saturation point or you’re stuffed, leaving you drained and out of control. If this describes your world, it’s important to be aware of these patterns so you can establish a sense of equilibrium.
The emotional eating cycle
The cycle of emotional eating usually starts with a strong emotion you’re feeling—perhaps you’re feeling stressed, sad, or even tired. At this moment, food can feel like the perfect pick-me-up or a quick reward to cope with those emotions. Without a moment’s thought, eating can become a primary emotional tripper, where each habit that takes you to the icebox seems perfectly well ‘excused’ — because of stress or loneliness or boredom. Yielding to this maladaptive habit can make you feel even worse afterward, particularly when empty calories are eaten without doing anything to satiate emotional craving. This could lead to brutal self-guilt when you might go into self-loathing mode for having “screwed up,” or you may feel that you don’t have the willpower to turn things around. The main thing is learning healthier ways to deal with those feelings, such as strategies for overcoming cravings and ensuring that you don’t stray into emotional eating before it happens. Identifying triggers is a powerful first step toward positive change and body weight control without the sense of helplessness over food.
The difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger
Once you can tell the difference, emotional hunger, and physical hunger feel entirely different. Emotional hunger can come on quickly and feel dramatic, leading to an immense desire to devour comfort foods — cheesecake, pizza, a family-sized bag of chips — for a momentary sense of relief. Physical hunger, by contrast, develops slowly and is often also satisfied with more wholesome food such as vegetables or nutritionally dense options. With physical hunger, you can feel it in your stomach with feelings like a growling belly or hunger pangs, and you’re likely to stop eating when you feel full. In contrast, emotional eating often results in mindless eating until you are painfully full and may result in feelings of regret, guilt, or shame. If you see these cues, you can break the cycle and respond consciously and not, “I want a hamburger.”
What causes someone to eat because of their emotions?
Emotional eating is usually in response to external factors such as job stress, financial concerns, or relational conflict. Health issues or restrictive diets, for example, can exacerbate the urge to seek comfort through food. Dieters or those who score low on introspective awareness may be less able to regulate emotions in a healthy way and resort to automatic eating as a coping mechanism. And some have difficulty regulating emotions, which makes the process of understanding and describing them—alexithymia—challenging. It can impact the HPA stress axis, wherein the body’s response to producing cortisol could trigger the urge to eat as a balm for stress. It grows into an entrenched habit that becomes second nature, though it never actually meets emotional needs.
Is emotional eating an eating disorder?
Emotional eating isn’t generally considered an eating disorder, but it can be disordered eating. When emotions take precedence over physical hunger when it comes to eating, or there are rigid choices of food or a habit of labeling foods as good or bad, it can be a sign of deeper issues. Frequent dieting, restricting food, or eating at unusual times can exacerbate this behavior, even causing obsessive thoughts about food that hinder daily life. Eating becomes an unhealthy pattern if the food is followed by feelings of guilt or shame. While emotional eating doesn’t officially qualify as an eating disorder, a mental health professional or registered dietitian can address a person’s negative relationship with food and determine whether other support is warranted, according to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Alternatives to emotional eating
If you feel fatigued, this may be a sign to take a break. Playing with your dog or cat is sometimes a way to lift your spirits as well. If you are feeling anxious or have some nervous energy, dance to a favorite song, read a book, or squeeze a stress ball. While feeling existentially fatigued, enjoy a hot cup of tea, insulated blankets, and scented candles. When feeling bored, entertain yourself with a good book, a comedy show, or the Great Outdoors! Finding space to do something you enjoy—woodworking, playing guitar, shooting some hoops, or even scrapbooking—can be a rewarding way to process feelings without food involved.
Keep an emotional eating diary
An emotional eating diary will give you insights into trends and triggers behind your desire to eat. Writing down what you’ve eaten, how you felt before and after, and if any triggers sent you to the refrigerator or pantry in search of comfort food (your own personal Kryptonite) may reveal a pattern. This can give you a sense of whether stress eating occurs around certain deadlines, family functions, or just an upsetting thing in general that has you gorging. Think of the diary as a kind of critical friend — an honest journal that guides you to reverse the emotional eating loop and find healthier ways to nurture your feelings with food, not with food.
Schedule your meals
But cutting back on emotional eating can be easier when you employ behavioral strategies such as eating at roughly the same time each day. That way, both physical hunger and emotional hunger can be managed. When you know that you have fixed set times like breakfast, lunch, dinner in the evening, and a snack, it makes it much easier to stop eating because you will be eating again in a few hours if you eat out of emotion. Research shows there’s a cold-hot empathy gap where, when we’re in a cold state (feeling neutral and calm), we routinely underestimate future hunger. In hot states (experiencing strong cravings), we may overestimate how much food we truly need. To avoid this, try planning what you’ll eat in advance, maybe for a week at a time — a method that is effective in eating a balance of foods to benefit diet quality and perhaps even lower the risk of obesity. Create a weekly plan to meal prep for each day of the week, Monday — Sunday, and try to eat every 3 hours or within a 12-hour window before going to bed. If you are feeling very hungry, try waiting half an hour to see if your appetite goes away.
5 Strategies to Help You Stop Emotional Eating
It’s sometimes easier to run straight to the freezer for ice cream or park yourself down on the couch and space out with a bag of chips after a bad day or a blowout with your partner. This type of eating (emotional or stress eating) is a common coping mechanism used to help ourselves feel better when we feel angry, sad, or stressed, but it can morph into a negative eating pattern that ultimately does not make us feel better over time. That said, experts such as Anna Kippen, MS, RDN, LD, a registered dietitian from the Cleveland Clinic, say that these feel-good foods can act as a remedy for “uncertainty fatigue” but can inflict long-lasting harm on our health and diets. Instead, practicing strategies that tackle the underlying reasons for these feelings may help ease cravings. Regular practice of these approaches can go a long way in controlling emotions without using food to tamp down the feelings.
1. Get down to the root cause
Emotional eating often comes from deeper issues than a bad day at work or a quarrel with a friend. At times, it’s based on long-standing issues like chronic stress, anger, and even depression. These larger issues make it difficult to rein in cravings when short-term travails feel besetting. To do this, it is useful to know who (or what) you really need in your life. In addition to other emotional-holding strategies, counseling, stress management, and exercise are potent things that can help. So, by addressing the key cause behind emotional eating, you can make a massive difference to your health and well-being.
2. Ask why you’re eating
Before you reach into the refrigerator, pantry, or vending machine, pause and ask yourself one simple question: “Am I even hungry?” Kippen recommends asking yourself to rate your hunger on a scale from 1 to 5 — one meaning not hungry at all and five meaning you’d eat what you hate most in the world, like barramundi or beets, just to douse the fire. If your hunger registers about three or four, it could be time to grab a healthy, balanced snack in the next 15 minutes or a meal within 30 minutes. They can still distract you from your physical hunger, but instead of chomping on the next item you set your eyes on, they can lead to low act of choosing to brew a cup of fruity herbal tea or walk it off so that you can stretch your imagination away from being compelled to eat something just out of boredom.
3. Instead of taste, rely on other senses
If you are not physically hungry but the craving comes up, try to redirect using other senses to take your mind off of food temporarily and also to help manage emotions. Sight-focused outings, such as a walk through a pretty neighborhood or a visit to museum exhibits, can be refreshing in terms of the sensory experience they offer. For a scent-based strategy, breathe in the smell of essential oils or the fragrance of freshly cut grass. If you prefer sounds, consider listening to music, nature sounds, or a white noise recording to occupy your mind. For touch, think about fidget toys, stress balls, chewing gum, or mints — a tactile experience that’s soothing, but that trains you to be able to cope in ways that don’t involve taste.
4. Choose foods that fight stress
There are foods that promote your brain health and fight stress. Hot teas such as green tea, matcha tea, or white tea have soothing steam and are rich in antioxidants and L-theanine, an amino acid that can help lower increasing stress levels. Dark cherries offer a sweet evening snack with melatonin to enhance sleep. Salmon and other omega-3 fatty acid-rich fish are also excellent options. Even dark chocolate (at least 72% cacao) and whole grains, nuts, legumes, fruits, and vegetables can foster emotional flourishing. Kippen advises to stock up on these options and to steer clear of the processed junk, which may only make you feel worse in the long run.
5. Make emergency packages
If stress-related snacking is a temptation, it’s best to prepare emergency-sized portions of those snacks to prevent overeating or binging. One example is pre-portioning healthy snacks (like nuts, popcorn, or sliced veggies) into baggies or containers. Simple recipe to fight cravings long term: These healthy options won’t be available all the time. If emotional eating seems too hard to control, you may want to seek medical help. A physician can also offer you a treatment plan to counteract emotional issues like stress, depression, tantrums, and other negative emotions that can lead to unhealthy eating patterns.
Conclusion
Emotional eating often feels like an instinctual reaction to stress, boredom, or sorrow, but you don’t have to let it dictate your behavior. By knowing the difference between emotional and physical hunger, recognizing your triggers, and finding healthier ways to cope, you can free yourself from the cycle. Tools such as maintaining an emotional eating journal, planning meals, and eating stress-busting foods give you the power to deal with the underlying factors that lead to emotional eating. Food will not become my enemy anymore, but with regular practice and self-awareness, I’m learning to react appropriately to my emotions and take the right steps towards well-being.