Emotional eating occurs when food becomes an outlet for uncomfortable feelings such as anger, sadness, stress, anxiety, or boredom. Eating is used as an escape mechanism when feelings such as these arise—such as sadness, stress, anxiety, and boredom. However, you can use proven strategies to break the cycle of emotional eating. These include practicing mindfulness, identifying triggers, and developing healthier coping skills.
1. Take a Break
Emotional eating can often be caused by emotions like stress, anger, or depression. To combat this behavior and regain your equilibrium, try practicing healthy coping mechanisms such as exercising or meditation as ways of alleviating these negative emotions.
Physical hunger causes people to be more aware of what and why they are eating, while emotional hunger often happens without thought or awareness; before long, you have inhaled an entire bag of chips or pint of ice cream without even tasting or enjoying it! PMR allows participants to increase awareness of their body through practice in alternately tightening and relaxing muscles, creating mindfulness as well as emotional regulation.
2. Think About Your Emotions
Emotions can greatly influence our eating. Food can be a harmless treat or celebratory token, but it can become harmful if used to cope with negative feelings.
Gaining awareness of the emotional triggers behind emotional eating can help you identify them and use transformative techniques such as Progressive Muscle Relaxation, Self-Soothing or the 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Technique to change your behavior and decrease the intensity and frequency of cravings.
3. Slow Down and Savor Your Food
People often turn to food as an emotional release. Unfortunately, this doesn’t address any underlying problems. Slowing down and enjoying every bite allows you to better appreciate what you are eating while also realizing when your stomach is full, helping you consume smaller portions.
Eat in a quiet, calm space free from distractions (e.g., television or phone). This will help you notice hunger and fullness cues, as well as the textures, flavors, and aromas of your food.
4. Take a Deep Breath
Emotional eating occurs when we turn to food as a source of comfort, even though this may not always be beneficial and may even lead to more serious issues like binge-eating disorders and weight gain. Applying mindful strategies such as progressive muscle relaxation (PMR), diaphragmatic breathing, and the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique can help you recognize emotional triggers and regulate your mood without turning to food for relief. They can also heighten body awareness—an essential step toward curbing mindless eating habits.
Breaking the link between negative emotions and food may seem impossible, but with proper support, it is achievable. Talking with a mental health professional may help identify and address the cause of your emotions as well as provide healthy coping methods to manage them.
5. Identify Your Triggers
Emotional eating is often used as a coping mechanism against negative emotions and situations, so identifying any triggers that cause you to turn to food for comfort could be useful in finding solutions to emotional eating urges. Track what you eat and your emotions by keeping a food and mood journal, then review it to identify patterns.
For instance, if food is your go-to solution when stress hits, try looking into alternative strategies to alleviate it—perhaps taking a walk, calling a friend, or doing some yoga can all be effective ways of relieving tension.
6. Seek Support
If you find yourself struggling with emotional eating on a regular basis, seek assistance. A therapist may help to identify why and teach coping mechanisms; additionally, they could discover any possible disorders linked to emotional eating that might contribute to it.
Make an effort to use distraction techniques when feeling an urge to turn to food for comfort. Doing this regularly will help replace comfort food with healthier alternatives while simultaneously relieving anxiety and stress—both key contributors to emotional eating.
7. Take a break.
Emotional eating can lead to weight gain and increase the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, depression, and other health problems. While using food to soothe negative emotions isn’t necessarily bad in itself, when used regularly it can have serious repercussions for our bodies.
Mindfulness techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation (PMR), diaphragmatic breathing, self-soothing, and the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique can be very effective at breaking the cycle of emotional eating. Furthermore, these strategies can also help build healthier coping skills and eventually replace unhealthy habits over time.
8. Reframe Your Cravings
Cravings can be powerful forces, and diverting your attention away from them may help ease an episode. Good sleep hygiene, a healthy diet and exercise, recovery apps, and peer support communities all can play an integral part in reducing cravings.
Mindful of emotional eating’s ineffective solutions and tendency to worsen them, focus on other healthier coping mechanisms such as meditation, deep breathing, and reaching out to support networks as healthy ways of dealing with your emotions. Therapy may also help identify triggers and reveal more productive ways of handling them.
9. Focus on Your Body
Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR), Diaphragmatic Breathing, Self-Soothing techniques and the 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Technique can all help combat emotional eating by increasing mindfulness and awareness of bodily cues like growling stomachs or hunger pangs.
Finding alternatives to food as a means of emotional satisfaction is essential. Activities like art, exercise, and socialization may help relieve your emotions more than food does; yoga, meditation, or deep breathing exercises may even help alleviate stress levels, which will ultimately lessen the urge to overeat emotionally.
10. Practice Mindfulness
Emotional eating can often happen subconsciously; before you know it, half a bowl of ice cream could have disappeared from your freezer! By practicing mindfulness regularly, however, you can more quickly recognize when emotional eating has occurred and stop before it’s too late.
Studies have revealed that mindful eating programs are effective at decreasing emotional eating, external eating, and some bulimic behaviors among people with obesity or overweight in a PC setting. Their exact impact on weight loss remains uncertain and further studies should investigate this avenue of inquiry.