Hogging on French fries when angry? Finishing a bucketful of chocolate ice cream after a broken heart? Gorging on to a plateful of creamy pasta when tense? Are you unable to stop reaching for food even when you are not hungry? If your answer to any of these was yes, then you’re letting your feelings overrule your appetite. This may mean an emotional eating disorder.
Emotional eating refers to when people use food as a response to an emotional trigger like boredom, stress, fatigue, tension, depression, anger, anxiety, or loneliness. This makes it impossible for them to remember what true hunger feels like. Instead they eat to comfort and soothe themselves.
All of us, at some point, may have let our feelings overrule our appetite and later regretted it. However, when emotional eating or compulsive eating becomes a person’s only technique to deal with emotions or negative feelings, it is a serious problem. It can pave the way for a variety of other complications and issues like obesity. Another disorder derived from obsessive and frequent emotional eating is binge eating. Frequent uncontrollable binge-eating episodes are typically brought on by stress, loneliness, depression, or anxiety. These often result in a cyclical pattern in which negative emotions lead to emotional eating, in turn leading to additional feelings of depression or self-hatred.
Bulimia is an extremely dangerous outcome of emotional eating where one experiences binge or over-eating behaviours followed by an attempt to purge the calories just consumed. Purging includes vomiting, laxative abuse, or over exercising. These are unsafe and can lead to various health complications.
Identifying what triggers emotional eating is the first step. The second is to develop alternatives. So the next time you try to reach for food in response to an emotional trigger, change your direction towards another pleasurable activity — reading, listening to music, shopping, going to a spa, doing breathing exercises, dancing, or playing board games — until the urge to eat passes. In addition, consult a clinical psychologist who can suggest other coping strategies. Overcoming emotional eating is not about depriving yourself; it’s about learning adaptive and healthy coping mechanisms and handling deeper issues effectively.
Symptoms
Always snacking on something even when full.
Not being able to control what or how much you eat.
Hiding or stockpiling food to binge on later.
Feeling guilty or disgusted after eating.
Feeling sudden pangs of hunger that you need to satisfy immediately.
Craving specific comfort foods such as pizza, steak, ice cream or cookies, but not caring as much about what to eat to satisfy physical hunger.
The writer is a clinical psychologist based in Delhi.
