How Mindfulness Helps Emotional Eating

Do you use food to meet your emotional needs instead of nourishing your body? If you turn to food as a way of comfort, you may be engaging in emotional eating. It’s common for people to turn to food for comfort especially during stressful times. But this comfort doesn’t last and brings a whole host of other problems with it. Learning how mindfulness helps emotional eating can help break this unhealthy cycle.

Welcome to Mindfulness Monday! This week we’ll address the difficult topic of emotional eating, learn to recognize it and begin to heal it. As you probably know, emotional eating doesn’t really make you feel any better afterwards. You end up in a cycle of eating to avoid unpleasant emotions, only to feel guilty, sad and out of control. Which starts the cycle all over again. Eating to fill an emotional void or avoid emotions, instead of eating for nourishment, leads to weight gain and unhealthy eating disorders. Additionally, your real emotional issues remain unaddressed.

what is emotional eating?

Emotional eating involves a learned behavior of eating to avoid uncomfortable emotions, fill an emotional void or reward oneself for good behavior. Shockingly, we learned this behavior in childhood. Brochi Stauber, a registered dietitian with knowledge of behavioral science, describes this process in her recent article. Parents can enrich a child’s emotional world with affection, connection, social interaction, communication, empathy, creativity, intrinsic motivation and problem solving. Alternately, they can simply use food or candy.

Stauber points out that all too often as children we received messages that food was the answer to life’s problems. Consider the numerous crafts that involve food, or how easy it is to “bribe’ a child with candy to obtain a desired behavior. Even worse, can anyone remember coming home from school with a problem, and mom offered cookies and milk to “make you feel better”? There exist many other examples of the training we received as children teaching us to “use” food for emotional purposes. When given candy to “keep us quiet” we learned to use food to fill empty time. We learned to change our behavior with a promised “food” reward. If faced with stress or unpleasant emotions, we learned to “feel better’ by eating something. This ingrained behavior does not change easily. But learning how mindfulness helps emotional eating is a start.

understanding our emotional connection to food

By now your mind thought of dozens of occasions that food played a huge part in how you deal with life. We can certainly see how parents, teachers and other adults used food to motivate, correct or “keep us quiet”. But it’s bigger than that. The building continues on the foundation laid at home. I hear parents complain about the evils of processed foods and sugar, but the foods themselves are not the problem.

Society itself favors the use of food for all of our emotional needs. Commercials abound with messages of using food for entertainment, relaxation, reward, connection or motivation. As a result what we learned as children becomes reinforced by society. This creates a strong emotional connection to food for the wrong purposes. Sugar has zero nutritional value and is the chief cause of obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. As if that wasn’t enough, it triggers the release of dopamine in the brain. This “feel good” chemical is the exact chemical the brain releases when you take heroin or other recreational drugs. This makes sugar not only destructive, but addictive. The more we hear encouragement to use food for all of the above reasons, the stronger the emotional connection.

breaking the emotional eating cycle

Learning how mindfulness helps emotional eating gives us a tool to manage this unhealthy cycle. But first we must understand “why” we engage in emotional eating and the difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger. The emotional eating cycle starts with a “trigger” or stress. Then we turn to food for comfort, feeling temporary relief. Afterwards feelings of guilt and sadness set in, and the cycle repeats.

Recognize Your Triggers

If you learn to recognize what triggers your need to use food for comfort, you can increase your awareness to explore your current reactions and healthy alternatives.

• Food Cravings. This is often a sign of emotional stress.
• Uncomfortable Emotions. When anger, hurt or sadness arise, reaching for food is a way to deny or “stuff” the emotions.
• Stressful Situations. Stress triggering a need for food is an avoidance tactic. When the body is under stress, it releases cortisol. This causes cravings for sugary or salty foods.
• Comfort Needs. Remember when mom dished up a big bowl of ice cream when your boyfriend broke up with you? Disappointments will have you reaching for food.
• Boredom. Our learned behavior coming out; we eat to fill empty time just like on all those long car rides when we were little.
• Deprivation. Feelings of deprivation as a result of discipline. Withholding food to lose weight or punish yourself for overeating.

Try keeping a food journal to note what specifically happens when you reach for that unhealthy snack or overeat at meals. Examine thoughts at the time. This will identify your most common triggers. Then you can work to create healthier habits.

Emotional Hunger vs Physical Hunger

Consider the traits of physical hunger and compare with the hunger that results from emotional eating. Learn to recognize the difference and know when you are truly hungry.

Physical Hunger	Emotional Hunger
Develops over time.	Develops randomly & quickly
Comes with physical signs: empty stomach, lack of energy, stomach growling, moodiness.	No signs of physical hunger, but signs of emotional discomfort.
You want to eat healthy food and are open to eating a variety of foods.	Comes with specific food cravings (sugar & salt). Stress about food choices labeling foods as “good” or “bad”.
While eating, your senses engage and you enjoy your food.	Ignore portion sizes & overeat Eat as in a “trance”.
After eating you feel full and satisfied.	Not usually full after eating
You don’t have feelings of guilt afterwards.	Feelings of guilt and sadness afterwards.

How mindfulness helps emotional eating

Once we start to recognize why we choose emotional eating and the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger, we can begin to change. Mindfulness is a great way to curb emotional eating. Using mindfulness increases our awareness of our bodies, thoughts and emotions. We engage all five senses and bring ourselves into the present moment. Learning how mindfulness helps emotional eating will help us identify and manage our reactions to negative emotions and situations.

If you are new to mindfulness, or simply to refresh your memory on how to practice mindfulness, read my instruction post. Practicing mindfulness related to your eating habits will help you slow down, tune in to your body and determine what emotions are present in that moment. As you sit with the emotions present in your body without judgement, the uncomfortable “feeling” will diminish. You will then be less reactive and able to respond with better choices.

Eating with Mindfulness

Having a regular mindfulness practice will help you develop an awareness of your body’s needs and felt emotions. But eating mindfully is something we can all benefit from. I have a robust mindfulness practice, but eating mindfully still eludes me. I eat my breakfast and lunch at my desk while working. Since lunch is my “big” meal of the day, I eat a snack for dinner; unfortunately I also eat that while doing something else. Try these tips to bring yourself into the present moment and enjoy your meals.

• Start with Mindful Breathing. Before digging in, take a few moments for a mindful breathing technique. The techniques that I outline in my Calming Techniques Guide take only a few moments. You can grab your FREE copy at the end of this post.
• Look at Your Food. If given a full plate, take time to gaze at the offering and presentation. If filling your own plate, enjoy carefully placing the food on your plate while looking at each offering.
• Smell Your Food. Enjoy the aromas! Breathe deeply.
• Taste Your Food. Really taste your food. Chew slowly, consider the flavors, herbs and spices, textures. Put your fork down in between bites.
• End with Gratitude. Most people begin their meals with gratitude, which is fine, but I like to end with gratitude. It allows that final focus on food as nourishing the body and the pleasure of eating gracefully.

Make sure to eliminate unnecessary distractions before beginning. Believe it or not eating mindfully does not require a large time commitment. It does require an intentional effort and awareness, but if you try this method you will experience a more fulfilling mealtime. Even for a quick lunch at the office, you can take a few moments away from the computer screen and eat with intention and grace.

use mindfulness to tame emotional eating

Some emotional eating triggers stem from learned childhood behaviors, while others run much deeper. As you work through your emotional triggers, don’t hesitate to seek counseling help for more complex emotional issues. The tips in this article may be helpful in most cases, but deeper issues of shame and self-loathing require sensitive care.

Emotional eating is the leading cause of weight struggles, and can keep us in a never ending unhealthy cycle. Women are their own worst critics especially when it comes to self image. No matter the source of your emotional triggers, be kind and compassionate to yourself. Self loathing will not keep you from overeating or help you lose weight. To the contrary, it will only drive you to continue your unhealthy relationship with food. Learning how mindfulness helps emotional eating will enable you to view your body, emotions and thoughts without judgement. This creates space to heal your relationship with food and stop reactive emotional eating.

Feature Image Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels