Embrace your feelings (without food)

Emotional eating (also known as stress eating) is using food to make yourself feel better. When you comfort eat, you eat to satisfy emotional needs, rather than to satisfy physical hunger.

In a nutshell, food makes you feel better in an emotional situation, and is often your go-to when you're sad, stressed or even happy or excited. It applies to all emotions, not just the negative ones. What triggers you to respond this way may be as individual as a fingerprint: the bad and good that come from work, relationships, parenting, illness, and even boredom.

Emotional eating may be a factor in why some people gain weight, and one of the biggest obstacles to losing it.

“We know that emotions could influence eating, and that may get in the way of long-term weight-loss goals,” says Edie Goldbacher, PhD, Licensed Clinical Psychologist, who notes that the topic has received an increasing amount of research attention in the past 10 years. “The need can be powerful.”

Yes, it can. After all, food is love; food soothes; food fills a void. But that feeling is fleeting, and it’s possible that people know on some level that the satisfaction they get from the food is false and comes at a cost. Or, as Daniel Friedland, MD, CEO of SuperSmartHealth puts it, “Emotional eating feels good, but it doesn’t feel right.”

The key to breaking the cycle is understanding that the problem isn’t the food, or even the eating. The cycle kicks in long before you head to the kitchen.

The goal of new treatment approaches is to encourage people to live with uncomfortable emotions so they’re not compelled to numb them with food, says Evan Forman, PhD, Psychology Professor at Drexel University. He co-authored a study in Obesity in 2016 comparing acceptance-based treatment—which focuses on tolerating discomfort and making mindful decisions—with traditional behavioural therapies like distracting oneself from unhealthy eating. Patients in the acceptance-based programme lost significantly more weight.

”Maybe you taught yourself in the past that the only way to feel less sad was to eat ice cream, and it became a habit,” says Forman, author of Effective Weight Loss: An Acceptance-Based Behavioral Approach. “But tolerating the sadness is a skill you can acquire. Instead of saying ‘I can’t stand feeling this way,’ you say ‘It’s OK. Sadness is part of being human. I will embrace it and learn from it.’”

Forman says this “can potentially be life-altering” because it helps give you the power to make decisions that are in line with your weight loss goals, rather than trying to assuage your discomfort by eating.

People who decide to lose weight may start with a negative attitude about food. To achieve successful weight loss, Friedland notes, they have to transform from a static way of thinking—believing a setback is a failure, for example, and that nothing will ever change—to a positive, growth mind-set. “Discover new ways of responding to your emotions and you make it easier to focus on your goals,” he says.

How do you do that? Instead of allowing negative thoughts to drive automatic behaviours, pause and listen to your emotions. “Identify what you’re feeling and realise that this experience is happening because something you care about is at stake,” Friedland explains. “A person with a growth mindset thinks ‘This is a gift. It will help me understand what’s important to me. I trust there are other ways to deal with the feeling. I can learn from this.’”

That shift also helps remind you of your most important values. “This is when you ask, ‘What do I really care about?’” Friedland says. “‘What’s my best response?’”