The Solution to Emotional Eating?

Nice post.

For about three years I've been living 'post bulimia' after 15 years of all the chaos that is that disorder.

A key piece of advice I received during treatment was that each time I enjoy a balanced, nutritious meal that is an opportunity to build/reinforce new and more helpful habits.

I still think that each time I sit down to eat... Now choosing good food is a habit and when I find myself faced with cravings or a desire to eat when not hungry I can identify why I want to eat and modify my behaviour appropriately... That said I'm not perfect I do perhaps eat rather too much chocolate, but overall I'm much happier, much fitter, much healthier and life is good.

"The solution to emotional eating is to understand the right reasons for eating and ingrain them into your belief systems"

This statement is ridiculous. Emotional eaters know the right reasons to eat, however, they have developed a pattern of filling an emotional void, pain, emptiness or even happiness with the soothing effect of food.

To imply that emotional eaters simply need to understand "what food is for" is simply wrong.

If you really want to read an experts advise on emotional eating consider Christopher Fairburn's Over Coming Binge Eating or Joyce Nash's Binge No More.

Well it's no surprise that we eat when we feel mad, bad, glad or sad. After all, when we fell down and scraped a knee, our tears were blotted with a cookie (not a carrot). When we did well we were rewarded with a chocolate. When we celebrate Christmas, Thanksgiving etc.... it's about eating, so we associated 'good times' with eating. When people do The Mind over Fatter programm on the the things we teach them is that they have 4 different hungers and that the only one asking for fuel is tummy hunger. All the others are imposter hungers that need 'feeding' of a different kind.

It's not our need for fuel that makes us fat, but eating for all those imposter hungers sure does.

Bang on Jane!

Habits... the KEY to success. Why should you expend your energy day-in and day-out worrying about what you heat, what you do etc.

Making a plan to IMPLEMENT a habit is key, because after a while, everything becomes autopilot. Plus once you develop a habit its hard to break out of it. Our bodies love routines...

Now the post says the solution is to understand the right reasons. But don't emotional eaters eat on impulse? I doubt they bother or care the reasons behind WHY they eat.

Emotional well-being, along with education sounds like the solution IMO.

While I mostly agree with what's said here, I think something important is being overlooked.

Eating is also a social activity and always has been throughout history and regardless of culture. While eating should mostly be for nourishment and fuel, it should also be used as a way to connect with family, friends, and culture. Of course, overindulgence should be mostly avoided (although not always!) But to neglect this aspect of food and eating would be a mistake that could end up depriving your social, emotional, and maybe ultimately physical, health.

While I do agree that food is obviously much more to our society than simply fuel, people who have disordered eating may need to refocus their attitudes toward food by viewing it as simply fuel for at least some amount of time until they can learn to deal with their emotions in a different way. I was never a huge emotional eater, but I definitely overindulged on holidays and I DID tend to use food as a reward for myself. Once I decided to get healthier, I started dealing with my emotions by journaling and when I was bored, I found other things to do with my time besides eating. Now, I still enjoy food, but I don't bury my emotions in it like I used to.

Something to consider other than bingeing for emotional reasons, is the havoc that over-restrictive diets can bring. When I was younger and more likely to diet, I used to try to eat fat-free sugar-free vegetarian meals, and I would never be satisfied. I'm still not sure if it was lack of fat or lack of protein, but I would eventually get so hungry I would eat everything in sight. Now I eat happily eat moderate fat and protein meals, and the weight is slowly coming off.

Personally I think that viewing food just as fuel is narrow. Eating food is pleasurable - but it becomes a problem when we seek to use food to meet emotional needs that cannot be resolved with food.

Jim & Diet blog; thanks for posting this. I agree with almost everything said in the comments above and discussed all these issues in my book:

"Personally I think that viewing food just as fuel is narrow"

agreed, and discussed on pages 84-85

"Eating food is pleasurable - but it becomes a problem when we seek to use food to meet emotional needs that cannot be resolved with food."

agreed and discussed on pages 67 & 86

"Something to consider other than bingeing for emotional reasons, is the havoc that over-restrictive diets can bring"

agreed and discussed on pages 11-12, 270

"eating is also a social activity and always has been throughout history and regardless of culture. While eating should mostly be for nourishment and fuel, it should also be used as a way to connect with family, friends, and culture"

agreed and discussed on pages 65-67 and all of chapter 9

"emotional eaters... have developed a pattern of filling an emotional void, pain, emptiness or even happiness with the soothing effect of food"

agreed and discussed on pages 66-67, 75-76

"don't emotional eaters eat on impulse?"

agreed and discussed on page 66, 68, 72-73

Thank you for all your comments. I wanted to point out that my words above are only a tiny excerpt taken out of a much larger context; a piece of a piece. The Body Fat Solution is about synergy and the whole, not isolation or individual parts.

To view the statement that we should eat for fuel as the solution by itself is not accurate and is missing the bigger picture. That's only one part. Don't miss the bigger picture, and where that one piece fits into it.

Best regards,

Tom Venuto

Ultimately, this kind of advice always sounds tautological to me. The solution to emotional eating is to stop eating for emotional reasons. The solution to depression is to stop being sad when there is no objective reason for it. The solution to anxiety disorder is to stop worrying so much. While obviously correct, such advice appears to be of little help.

The solution to emotional eating is not to have a kitchen full of ready-to-eat comfort food. Have a diet soda when you feel like you want something.

It's hard to eat "unconsciously" when everything you have takes at least 10 minutes to prepare.

Diet soda?? Undrinkable bilge, and bad for you.

Haven't studies found that people who drank diet soda were just as unhealthy and overweight as those that drank regular sodas?

My right of passage at 13 was my first diet. I weighed 112 pounds and wanted to weigh 107. I broke my diet (WW) with a french pastry -- a snack I always loathed, but I was STARVING.

20 years later, I managed to diet myself up to 189 pounds, zig zagging all the way. I'm 5'1", by the way.

Another 20 or so years later (now) I am not svelte, but have maintained my weight at 130 -135 (except for having my daughter when I was 40)ever since my LAST diet in 1990.

In all those years of dieting and overeating, I had "good" days, "bad" days, and years when I couldn't keep so much as a loaf of bread in the house without eating it in one sitting; binge eating that lasted for days and was exactly what I imagine drug addiction to feel like, and NO IDEA what normal hunger felt like anymore.

But I do know that that horrible, driving hunger I got after one of my more stupid diets (and even after the not-so-stupid ones) was more than emotional. I didn't want to gain weight ever. I don't know anyone who dieted unsuccessfully who did. But the hunger was overwhelming -- and physical. Maybe part of my brain was telling me that food was an emotional panacea, but I think most of it was more like how someone reacts to losing weight during a trauma -- like having a bad flu -- once the trauma is eased, your appetite comes back. Except for normal people, you're talking about five pounds. For me it was whatever I lost (even 50 lbs) plus 10%.

So, even though I am not quite normal with food, even after all this time (I still finish what's on my plate, even if it's the size of a Volkswagon) I am pretty normal most of the time. Here is what I've learned to do and what works for me.

I eat everything. Diets that limit one type of food never work for me, because I've found that no matter what the limited food was, that's the food I craved.

When I snack, I take a little less than I think I want, put it in a bowl and eat it. If I want more I go get some more (sometimes I do, but most often,I don't).

I try to eat when I'm hungry and stop when I'm full, which is still hard to figure out sometime. That includes lots of times when I skip breakfast and have my first meal after I've been up for a few hours. I am not hungry after eight hours of sleep, and forcing myself to eat defies logic.

I don't eat a lot of fast food or take out -- don't like it much. I try to eat a lot of different kinds of food every day, with plenty veggies. Some days it works, others not so much, but I keep trying.

I use real butter and salt when I cook -- they make things taste good, and I control the amounts -- less than what's in processed food, I'm pretty sure. I pass on lousy-tasting "low fat" substitutes.

When I really want something fatty, sugary or just bad-for-you, I eat it and move on. Strangely, I don't crave really bad stuff often and I've always got good munchies in the house. Just knowing I can is usually enough for me.

And one last thing. It's not fast food that made me fat or the snack food companies or my mom. It was me -- a combination of misguided dieting, and not trusting my own hunger. I did my body a lot of damage, and it all started with that first diet.

I don't think I got fat because I had a bad self-image or was unhappy. I was unhappy and had a bad self image because I got fat.

I did my fair share of emotional eating, but that was only after I began dieting, and, through denial-release, taught myself how good overeating could feel for the moment. If you don't want to eat for emotional reasons, don't start dieting.