Strategies for Emotional Eating

Written by Michelle Shelton

Dec 12, 2023

Emotions are an essential part of our human experience. They serve as a signal of how our body is responding to our external environment. They help us understand our needs, our boundaries, our values, and our talents. A healthy and open relationship with our emotions can pave a pathway to a life of deep fulfillment, connection, and wisdom.  

Many of us, however, did not develop a healthy relationship with our emotions. We instead learned to suppress them, avoid them, ignore them, and numb them. Food often serves as one of these distraction and numbing mechanisms. There is great power and potential for deep growth and change when we relearn to connect with our emotions and cope with them with kindness.

Eating is an emotional experience in itself, and usually tied to positive experiences of comfort and connection. Think of how food may have been used to care for you when you were sick (chicken noodle soup when you were sick) or celebrate important events (cake and ice cream on birthdays) or reward significant milestones (celebration dinners after a promotion). Food is deeply embedded in some of the most important aspects of our lives, a very positive aspect of the sensory pleasure of eating. But when we seek out food as a quick path to more positive feelings, it can inhibit our ability to process our emotions in healthy ways, leading to negative consequences. While food may give momentary relief from difficult experiences, it will never solve the real issue. It can only delay the inevitable, and often makes it worse as feelings of guilt over the emotional eating layer on top of the original problem.

It is also important to note that food restrictions, both physical and mental, can, in itself, trigger loss of control, which can be mistaken for emotional eating. Dieting can also trigger emotions such as guilt and shame that can then lead to emotional eating. One study documented that people with former or current dieting behavior have more emotional eating than non-dieters. It is important to consistently honor your hunger and make peace with food as you work through your emotional eating.

Emotional Hunger

We can use food to cope with emotions in a variety of ways and with varying intensity. Using food to cope is a response to emotional hunger, not physical hunger. Beginning to understand the difference between these two hungers can be a very helpful step in your intuitive eating journey.

Often people use food to cope without realizing that is what they are doing. They might think they are eating “just because the food tastes good” without realizing they are eating emotionally. As you practice honoring your hunger, attuning to your satisfaction, and feeling your fullness, pay attention (without judgment) to how often you feel the drive to eat past biological fullness. If you notice this happens often, chances are you are using food to cope. It could be as mild as using food to navigate the boredom of a tedious task – it doesn’t necessarily mean a deeper-seated emotional trigger. This one question can be very helpful in understanding your tendency to use food to cope: “If my body only needs a certain amount of food to feel satisfied, but I continue to eat after I am clearly full, then what other need am I trying to fill with food?” 

The below questions can help you separate your emotional needs from your physical needs and attune to what you really need in that moment:

Ask yourself:

1.      Am I biologically hungry? If the answer is yes, honor your hunger and eat. If the answer is no, ask the following questions.

2.      What am I feeling? There is great power and even release in naming your feelings. Naming your feelings allows you to understand it and respond to it in a helpful and appropriate way. It may be helpful to use the following strategies to get in touch with what you are feeling:

a.      Use a Feelings chart to identify and name your feelings.

b.      Journal about your feelings. Write about how it feels in your body, what thoughts you are having, what the feelings might be signaling for you in terms of your wants, your needs, or your values.

c.      Call a friend to talk about the feelings.

d.      Talk about the feelings while you record yourself on your phone.

e.      Allow yourself to just sit with and experience the feelings if you can.

f.       Talk to a counselor or therapist.

3.      What do I need? Feelings are an important part of our lives. They are signals that carry important information. Understanding them and understanding the needs underneath them are important to our self care and mental and physical health. As you sit with, journal, or talk about the feelings, you will better understand them. Watch for the needs they are surfacing for you.

4.      Would you please__? Once you understand the need, it’s time to vocalize it. Practice asking for what you need. You may need to ask for support or help from someone else. Other times, you may be the one most able to step in and fill those needs for yourself. Very often it is a combination of both. Recognizing and advocating for your needs is an important step in emotional self-care.  

As you get better at separating your emotional hunger from your physical hunger, you will begin to see that patterns of emotional eating actually serve as an early signal or cue that something is off for you in your life. When you notice that eating is not leading to feelings of satisfaction and a decrease in hunger, you can reflect on the questions above – Am I hungry? What am I feeling? What do I need? Over time, you will get better and better at recognizing and responding to your needs instead of avoiding, silencing, or numbing them. You will be more fully present to your full experience, and more connected with others, as well. In this way, your emotional eating serves as a strange but very useful gift.