WHY WE EMOTIONALLY EAT & HOW TO MINIMIZE STRESS EATING
EMOTIONAL EATING IS NORMAL, BUT IT’S NOT OUR ONLY TOOL FOR MANAGING STRESS.
The desire to raid the pantry or house a dozen cookies or skip dinner and go straight for dessert when stress is high is a common example of emotional eating. Emotional eating is when you use food for comfort rather than to satisfy a physical hunger.
The most traditional definition of emotional out there is “(over)eating in response to negative emotions.”
And there’s something so important to recognize when we talk about the topic of emotional or stress eating: this is not a character flaw.
There is this survey called the Stress in America survey conducted by the American Psychological Association that serves to identify leading sources of stress in the United States, common behaviors used to manage stress, and the impact of stress on our health, both physical and emotional. This survey highlights just how prevalent stress eating is:
Of the adults who overeat unhealthy foods when stressed, 33% say they do it to distract themselves from the stress. The survey finds that these behaviors are higher in women, who are more likely to report unhealthy eating behaviors as a result of stress. The percentage of those skipping meals due to stress is also higher in women, in teen girls, and in millennials.
When referring to stress here, we’re not just talking about a hard day at work. Stress encompasses feeling lonely or emotional turmoil, and then also work stress, relationship stress or caretaking, etc.
There’s nothing wrong with eating foods that are less nourishing sometimes, but it can become problematic -- to our health, to our relationship with food, to our trust around food -- if we consistently use junk food as the way to regulate our emotions.
Despite what the fitness industry tries to tell us, emotional eating is not an issue of willpower nor is it a moral shortcoming.
Delve deeper into this topic in this episode of our How to: Fitness podcast:
THIS IS WHY IT HAPPENS:
Why does food have so much power over us in the first place?
The human brain has a very complex reward system that drives all of our behaviors. Serotonin and dopamine are two important players in this system. Serotonin is involved in regulating our mood and appetite. Eating food that you like can temporarily elevate serotonin levels. This is why you might be driven towards sweet, salty, fatty ultra-processed foods when you’re feeling low, or when stress is exceptionally high.
Another neurotransmitter dopamine is involved with the reward pathways in the brain. Highly palatable foods, like fast food, release a lot of dopamine when you eat them. When you follow through on your cravings, the dopamine that is released can then reinforce your behavior and create a positive feedback loop.
STRESS AND EMOTIONAL REGULATION
There are also two important hormones involved in our stress response. One hormone is called epinephrine. During acute periods of stress, epinephrine acts to suppress hunger so your body can focus on short-term survival. This is sometimes what we feel when stress manifests as a lack of appetite or disinterest in food.
If you’re experiencing long-term stress, however, your body releases a hormone called cortisol which increases your appetite. As the species of homo sapiens evolved, we developed stress in response to periods of danger or physical exertion. Our bodies crave high-calorie foods during periods of stress to support our physical needs. Today our stress probably doesn’t come from a physical threat like it did thousands of years ago. However, we are still wired to crave food in response to emotional dysregulation.
LEARNED BEHAVIORS AND ASSOCIATIONS
We may crave certain foods because we have grown to associate them with positive emotions. Maybe you’d always get an ice cream after a test as a kid. This association was reinforced many times over the course of years, and now as an adult, you crave ice cream to bring that same sense of relief after a stressful day. Cultural norms we’ve grown up in also play a huge role:
Were you raised in a family that turned to food during rocky periods?
Was your community big on rewarding kids with a sweet treat?
Was fast food a celebration for doing something good, or a pick me up for a bad day?
Whether it’s lifestyle and conditioning or genetic predisposition, food as a coping tool and this tendency to utilize food to deal with stress is a dysregulated stress response.
The way we’ve grown up treating and valuing food significantly impacts how we think about food as an adult, and these associations we have with food may be stronger than our so-called “willpower” to resist it. This is what drives this feeling of being “out of control” when you eat “bad” foods that you are trying to avoid. It can cause guilt and shame as you try to wrangle with your habits that are really just ingrained values from an early age.
CONSEQUENCES OF EMOTIONAL EATING:
Now, let’s loop back to that Stress in America survey…
The American Psychology Association found that after overeating due to stress, 49% of adults reported feeling disappointed in themselves.
On a physical level, emotional eating can cause us to consume too many sweet and fatty foods. And when our bodies think we’re under chronic stress, we’re going to store more abdominal fat as a protective mechanism. This increases our risk of conditions like heart disease or diabetes.
So…now what?
STRATEGIES TO ADDRESS EMOTIONAL EATING:
When we are in a state of high stress and we are reaching for food as a stress reliever, to self-soothe, to fill a gap, we are looking for comfort and relief. We’ve explained the mechanisms by which this works in our brains and bodies – the dopamine hit we get from comforting food, and the elevated serotonin levels.
This positive feedback is quick and short-lived, so actionable strategies we can implement that address this emotional eating require a top-down approach that can help us separate emotions from hunger.
The solution is not more self-control, more willpower, or just “doing better.” This messaging is misleading and incredibly dismissive of our specific histories around reward-based eating and our personal satiety, and it is honestly messaging that promotes restriction that can only perpetuate the habit.
As always when it comes to our nutrition, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to addressing this tendency to use food as our go-to coping mechanism when stressed. Instead, we have options and the ability to find out what can serve us best.
PRACTICE RECOGNIZING PHYSICAL VS. EMOTIONAL HUNGER
We’re quick to call hunger, hunger. But physical and psychological hunger are completely different things, and they’re both impacted by sleep, stress, eating habits, mood, and exercise.
Physical hunger can be felt in your body, and it typically comes on slowly and develops over time. It is the sensation of hunger in your stomach or the way that you feel a bit lightheaded or fatigued when you get hungry. This is our body saying we need food, so the way we address physical hunger is by eating, meaning eating regularly, eating balanced meals, and eating when hunger manifests.
Psychological hunger is the emotional hunger we’re talking about here. It is rooted in our emotions and can crop up regardless of how long it's been since we ate a meal. It comes on quickly. This hunger is often more specific and can only be satiated by consuming specific foods.
This hunger is our body asking for that hit of dopamine to make us feel good, but when we address that need to feel good with food, it’s usually quite fleeting. We stuff ourselves and feel physically worse after.
If you're unsure which hunger you’re experiencing, ask yourself: “Would protein and vegetables satisfy me right now?”
CREATE AWARENESS AROUND OUR HUNGER & FULLNESS CUES’
Building off of the last point, we can practice becoming more in tune with our hunger and satiety cues. This is a skill that serves us outside of just times of big emotions!
We are, unfortunately, often very out of sync with their hunger cues. Diet culture encourages us to deny our hunger cues and eat as little as possible and we may have practiced that pattern for a long time. This denial of your hunger can also cause intense food cravings, so learning your cues can help you sort out when you are physically hungry as opposed to when you are seeking food because you’re emotionally upset.
We can help ourselves out by starting to eat when we first feel hungry (not waiting until we are hangry!). Intense levels of hunger impair our decision-making and impulse control and make it harder to stay in tune with these cues.
That brings us to…
PRACTICE MINDFUL EATING TOOLS
Mindful eating encompasses honoring our hunger and fullness cues as we just talked about. It also refers to eating undistracted, connecting with our food, considering where our food comes from, and eating slowly and carefully. It has been found that mindful eating techniques not only help minimize emotional eating, but also lead to better insulin resistance, lower stress levels, and long-term weight loss (as a byproduct, not the goal).
Slowing down our eating can take away that immediate reward/dopamine hit that a quick bit of food can provide, especially when we know that we typically feel worse after a bout of frantic emotional eating.
We can then redirect our attention to something that’s actually going to make us feel good, longer.
Listen to a really interesting experiment around mindfulness techniques for emotional eating in the full podcast episode!
REDIRECTING OUR STRESS
Food isn’t the only tool we have in our toolbox when navigating stress. Learn more about other tools we have and can practice so we don’t just turn to food when dealing with big emotions:
Because emotional eating can be triggered by stress, common stress-management techniques can be very helpful in mitigating the effects. Exercise is a great way to lower cortisol levels and release emotional stress in your everyday life. Meditation can also reduce stress as well as improve your ability to resist impulsive decisions. There are also some well-accepted techniques you can use to activate your parasympathetic nervous system and shift yourself out of panic mode. These techniques activate the vagus nerve. You can try rhythmic or belly breathing, humming, gargling, splashing your face with cold water, and taking a walk outside. These strategies can help you regulate at the end of a long day and replace the use of junk food as an emotional regulator.
Although it's easier said than done, changing your environment can really help with emotional eating as well. If you’re constantly stressed by your job, it's never going to be easy to avoid unhealthy habits. Making sure you rest enough and are not emotionally triggered in your daily life can go a long way in preventing emotional eating cycles.
With all this talk of stress management, you might still find it hard to avoid emotional triggers in your life, and this is where professional support can come into play. As coaches who provide support to countless individuals navigating various challenges, we know how valuable external support can be. When it comes to emotional eating, external support beyond that of a nutrition coach (we’re not therapists and will always stay in our scope of practice!! It could include a therapist with whom you can discuss your emotional triggers and who can help you practice more stress management techniques.
Above all, it’s essential to recognize that our self-belief matters greatly when it comes to how we utilize food as a coping mechanism. If we believe we can control our eating habits, or that our worth is tied to our bodies or our food choices, we’re reinforcing the idea that overeating and stress eating helps manage these emotions, and we continue to perpetuate the cycle.
We’re normal for turning to food when stress and emotions feel unmanageable, and we’re not stuck in a cycle of food as our only coping mechanism forever.
The HTF podcast is just one of many avenues in which I share health and nutrition education. You can find more episodes here on Apple Podcasts or here on Spotify, or check out other free resources such as free guides, guest podcast interviews, and more blog posts on our Resources page.