Many people struggle with emotional, and stress eating patterns and often feel frustrated, hopeless and helpless when it comes to changing these patterns. Those who struggle with emotional eating often feel that a diet or wellness program is the only way out of the pattern. However, diets inflict control, restriction and force us into having to think about what to—or not to—eat constantly. Diets may have their place in the world, especially for someone who does not struggle with emotional eating patterns, however, the data is pretty compelling when it comes to the statistics related to the effectiveness of dieting.
It is estimated that each year 45 million Americans go on a diet and that $33 billion is spent on weight loss products. According to the CDC, nearly half of all adults attempted to lose weight in 2018. Research through the National Institute of Health has shown that more than half of the lost weight was regained within two years. The same study showed that by five years post diet, more than 80% of lost weight was regained. Those are not so great numbers in favor of dieting! Yet, the dieting industry continues to prey on people’s weaknesses, exploiting weight as a problem, and offering restriction and control as the only solution. However, clearly their solution is temporary, problematic and potentially damaging to both our minds and our bodies.
Emotional eating really is an attempt to care for ourselves. Soothing emotional pain and life’s stressors with food provides us with a break, a numbing out, a moment where we can feel really good while eating the chosen or desired food. As human beings, we really don’t like to feel uncomfortable or to have to experience pain in any way. We avoid pain, including emotional pain, at all costs, and most of us are not given great coping strategies for dealing with painful emotions as children. While we often end up causing a host of other problems for ourselves through this avoidance of emotional discomfort with food, it is quick, easily available, and works every time.
When this pattern of emotional eating becomes the only way that we know how to handle our emotional suffering, it creates a vicious and dangerous cycle where food is the problem and food is the solution. Emotional eating can lead to undesired weight gain, which incites additional uncomfortable feelings of failure, pain, frustration, and often shame. You can see how this cycle continues to loop, grow roots, and create so much suffering, despite the intended desire and attempt to avoid pain. Patterns of emotional eating often leads to body image struggles, internalized shame, and creates a much deeper suffering, which often only thrusts us back into the yo-yo dieting cycle. Unfortunately, dieting often feels like the only possible solution, yet with the statistics related to dieting you can really foresee where that will lead without some other, more helpful intervention.
This is where mindful and intuitive eating practices can begin to offer some support, hope and challenge to the dieting mentality. Learning to be present with food, listen to our bodies, respect feeling hungry and connect with our bodies in a real way is tremendously powerful. However, difficult and painful emotions will inevitably arise again. Especially if someone has endured trauma or significant suffering (which is pretty much all of us) and a trigger occurs, the pull towards emotional eating can be very strong no matter how much mindful eating you’ve practiced or how in tune you are with your bodies hunger and full cues.
Emotional eating is impossible to heal through a diet or by simply being present with food, hunger, fullness or rejecting diets alone. To heal emotional eating, addressing the uncomfortable emotions, learning about emotional patterns of avoidance, as well as our stressors, and understanding our emotions and processing them is vital to this healing. Healing from the inside out is the only way because emotional eating really has nothing to do with the food at all, but how the food numbs our feelings and comforts our suffering.
There is a misconception that if you heal from emotional eating you won’t find pleasure with eating and be able to enjoy food in the same way. This is a fear that needs to be cleared up immediately, and often arises out of the wake of dieting where deprivation and restriction are necessary. When you can heal from emotional eating and integrate mindful and intuitive eating practices in a way that allows you to be the expert on not only in what your body wants and needs, but also in what brings you pleasure, you can create an immensely pleasurable relationship with food. There is a big difference in eating to experience pleasure versus eating to eliminate pain.
When you explore your patterns, emotions, the what, when, and why you jump towards avoidance with food (or any in any other way) rather than feeling your feelings, you can develop awareness into yourself very deeply. Self-awareness is always the first step; self-awareness is always where we must start on any journey. Without awareness there cannot be any change. To begin, it is helpful to give space to your feelings, to begin to learn and create a language related to feelings and to practice awareness, in the moment if possible, or as reflection if you find that you missed a moment of emotional suppression.
Journaling, mindfulness practices, meditation and reading about emotions are all ways to get closer to our inner world. When we offer ourselves time for reflection on our deeper internal experiences and to determine what really is going on inside ourselves we can discover what are we really feeling and why it is that we feel this way. Discovering what brings ourselves pleasure, comfort, ease, and joy in non-food ways can help create coping strategies that are more beneficial and useful. With time, practice and constantly growing in our self-awareness, food can become unentangled from the web of our emotions.
Giving space to finding pleasure in eating, delighting in foods that do bring us pleasure, comfort, ease and joy when we are not in a space of stress or emotional suffering also creates an opportunity to heal. When stuck in patterns of emotional eating, finding actual joy in eating can trigger feelings of shame or undeservingness, this is an important area to explore as well. When diets, restriction, hiding or withholding pleasure as punishment have been entangled with food, pleasure, body image, and eating, then choosing to eat decadent foods can feel like “cheating.” This is the process of letting go of old stories, patterns and ways of being with food and with ourselves. If eating something we desire causes increased discomfort, this the opposite of our original intent when it comes to healing our relationship with food. It’s helpful to get curious about how this fits into each of our own food stories.
This healing process from the inside out requires a willingness to let ourselves be a work in progress. So for now, start with self-awareness, what do you notice about your patterns? What does it mean about you when you find yourself emotional eating? Get curious. Journal. Spend time in deeper self-reflection. When we can become aware of our patterns, as well as the negative internalized beliefs more clearly we can begin to dive deeper and deeper into the exploration of emotions. This is the work required to truly heal from emotional eating. I hope you find some time to be present with your patterns, your self, and I’ll be back soon with more specific ways to help explore emotions fully and deeply as you continue along your healing journey.