Emotional Eating

image by jennipenni

I define emotional overeating as using food to distract from emotions. Emotional overeating can be conscious or unconscious eating and used to fill a void or distract from something else.

Emotional overeating is associated with stress, anxiety or sadness, but people can also overeat during times of extreme happiness. For example, holidays tend to be large factors that contribute to overeating. We see an increase in clients overall between Thanksgiving and New Years, but national holidays, birthdays, vacations and weddings, etc. are all occasions that people can find themselves eating more than necessary.

The American way tends to attach food to major holidays and there are more opportunities to overeat. While on vacation, people not only take a break from the day to day, but often their diets as well.

The first step is to determine what the overeating triggers are. We call these triggers fat traps and they are the people, places and things that tend to enable a person to overeat. After we have identified the triggers, we come up with a realistic action plan to help the person prevent ahead of time the tendency to overeat when faced with each of their fat traps.

Awareness of the who, what, when and where factors that make a person want to overeat is critical and the first step in a weight management program. Talking through these factors often leads to a simple solution to address each of the triggers.

It’s important that people are mindful of what they are eating. Pay attention to the Bites, Licks and Tastes (BLT’s). It’s also important to pay attention to your internal body cues. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 signifying absolute hunter, shaking, low blood sugar and 10 signifying absolute fullness from eating too much, you want to be between a 3 and 7. Five is ideal. We recommend people start eating at a 3 and end at 7. Eating when a person is at a 1 will almost ensure they finish eating at a 10. If you pass 7, then you are overeating. You’ll need to ask yourself why you are overeating. Is it mindless eating, too many BLT’s, is it emotional eating? By paying attention to what you eat, and a food journal can be beneficial here, and paying attention to your body cues, a person will end up taking in just the right amount of calories assuming the food choices they are making are healthy.