What is Emotional Eating?

• Stress
• Anger
• Anxiety
• Worry
• Guilt
• Fear
• Instability
• Powerlessness
• Shame
• Frustration
• Loneliness
• Despair
• Resentment
• Boredom
• Unworthiness

Finding ways to help with processing emotions is great, and we want to find healthy coping strategies, especially ones that don’t exacerbate those negative emotions.

Physiologically, emotional eating is simulating certain brain chemistry that tricks us into thinking the issue is being resolved. Stress in particular produces cortisol, which increases appetite. Emotional eating contributes to diabetes, high blood pressure, insomnia, body aches and other pains and ailments.

From a psychological point of view, emotional eaters connect food with comfort, power and positive feelings rather than providing energy to their bodies, and this may come from how they were raised.

These cause a feedback loop that reinforces habits, and people can get caught in the emotional eating cycle. Emotional eating can be just one of multiple unhealthy habit cycles, such as entertainment, substances, and various other addiction cycles.

The solution is to recognize triggers, understand the emotions, and handle them in constructive ways. The root of the issue is not having other tools to help process those emotions and turning to one that numbs rather than feels.