Emotional eating is something many of us learn from a young age.
We are taught that bad, yucky feelings like loneliness, guilt, shame, envy, sadness, and anger are not desirable, and that they should ideally not be experienced. We are sadly not given much of a crash course in how to sit with these uncomfortable emotions and work through them in a healthy way.
When these feelings arise in us, we understand we are meant to get rid of them as quickly as possible by pushing them down or wishing them away.
This is where food comes in on a white horse. Food is delicious and never judges you. It brings a feeling of satisfaction and fullness, however temporary, that is comforting.
As time goes on and you practise self-soothing with typically unhealthy or sugary foods, the brain learns to link these foods with an emotional release.
Just like nostalgia can make eating a certain food from childhood transform into a multi-sensory taste sensation, particular comfort foods may become your security blanket. You turn to them time and time again, and they never fail to fill that hole.
We develop relationships to foods that can lead to us finding excessive pleasure in them, over other self-care activities. I don’t know about you, but I’d take a gooey tray of brownies over a lavender-scented bubble bath any day of the week.
Emotional eating is so hard to control out of sheer willpower because it works so darn well. Scoffing a bag of salty crunchy potato chips sends your brain crazy awesome signals that produce a pleasure like no other. There’s no denying it. That’s why people do it.
BUT, it’s the feelings of guilt, shame and body hatred that accompany the bingeing that make this whole emotional eating thing a problem. If we were self-soothing with broccoli, maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal.
Women, especially, are under a ton of societal pressure to look a certain way, principally smaller. Most of us have been dieting on and off since we were teenagers, or been conscious about how much we should be eating since childhood.
The social consequences blow weight gain way out of proportion, and we fear ‘letting ourselves go’ more than bad grades or hunger pangs.
What they didn’t tell us back then and we need to learn as adults is that obsessing over weight, cycling through negative feelings of shame and self-hatred, and attempting to restrict food intake are counter-productive to actually staying a healthy weight.
Dieticians and food psychologists have come to the realisation that cultivating a healthy relationship with food is the key to maintaining a healthy weight over your lifetime.
Labelling certain foods as ‘bad’ and ‘off-limits’ only makes you more likely to binge on them. You can’t sit on your hands and resist every craving forever. Better to get curious about why we get those strong cravings in the first place.
Instead of tirelessly cycling through diet after diet, we might need to do some navel-gazing and examine why it is we are emotional eating.
There is a strong cultural myth that emotional eaters ‘just need to learn some self-control’, and are somehow weaker or less determined than people who eat more ‘normally’. This, however, misunderstands emotional eating and only leads to more feelings of shame when you comfort eat again.
By understanding more deeply which kinds of needs we are trying to meet with food, we can start to gradually replace those with decent substitutes and treatments. We can learn different ways to express feelings that make us uncomfortable.
With time and a lot of self-compassion, we can learn to break the cycle of emotional eating and wallowing in self-disgust and guilt.
If emotional eating is seriously affecting your everyday life and wellbeing, it’s definitely worth seeking the support of a professional. Having a companion on your journey who is an expert at helping people struggling with emotional eating can be a total game-changer.
Nothing is more important than your health, mental as well as physical. It’s possible to be suffering with extremely disordered eating, while looking a normal weight. It’s also possible to be very overweight and not be very conscious of what you’re putting into your body.
Emotional eating is an issue that people of all shapes, sizes, and walks of life struggle with. You are not alone. In fact, you’re in a giant crowd of overeaters and frustrated dieters.
What if the revolutionary dieting tactic is to give yourself a break from super-restrictive regimes and self-hatred, and dedicate some time to embracing your whole self?
Maybe, one day, we’ll reconnect with the simple joy of eating. No shame strings attached.
