Healing Emotional Eating — Where to Start? (Tips from an Intuitive Eating Dietitian)

“How do I stop emotionally eating?” is consistently one of the top concerns people share with me when I talk to them about their biggest struggles with food. As an Intuitive Eating dietitian, I understand how frustrating it is when you’re trying to eat mindfully, make better food choices, or honor your hunger and fullness cues, but you keep finding yourself turning to food for emotional reasons.

If you’re like most people who struggle with this, you likely feel worse when you eat emotionally, triggering a downward thought or shame spiral that sets you up for even more disembodied or disconnected eating.

So, how do you break the cycle and feel more in tune with your body, eating, and emotions? Let’s jump in and I’ll guide you through some practical tips and strategies to feel more connected and strengthen your relationship with food and yourself.

First, what is emotional eating and when is it a problem?

Just as it sounds, emotional eating is eating in response to emotional rather than physical or biological hunger. People may eat in response to a range of emotions, including anger, stress, sadness, boredom, loneliness, to reward oneself, and many others.

In and of itself, emotional eating is not necessarily bad. I share with my clients that nearly all eating is inherently emotional. After all, we’re humans with complex feelings that undoubtedly contribute to our food choices. Also, food is so much more than just nutrients. We use food to mark birthdays, anniversaries, funerals, traditions, holidays, culture, and so many other inherently emotional things.

I point this out because diet culture loves to demonize emotional eating, and I want to destigmatize it and remove any shame involved in the idea of emotional eating right at the outset.

The truth is food is one way to cope with emotions. If you’ve had a hard day and a mug of hot chocolate or a cookie turns your frown upside down, that’s not necessarily bad — especially if you’re making an intentional choice and feel connected to your body and what you’re doing.

Emotional eating may become problematic though if food is your only or primary way of coping with emotions or if you eat emotionally more often than you’d like or in ways that feel impulsive or out of control.

If Emotional Eating Makes You Feel Out of Control with Food, Start Here

Before we dive into strategies for coping with emotional eating, it’s important to distinguish between emotional eating and deprivation-driven eating that feels emotional and out of control.

If you’re someone who does many diets or has a very restrictive mindset around food, you may be stuck in the restrict-binge cycle with food and confusing or intermingling that with emotional eating. Restrictive eating practices and prolonged caloric restriction (as with dieting) very often lead to rebound overeating and bingeing that feels emotionally charged or out of control. There are both biological and psychological reasons why this happens, and the effects of food deprivation and restrictive eating are well documented.

One of the first things I do when I’m working with clients who are struggling with emotional eating, is ask questions about their current approach to food and dieting. If they’re stuck in the dieting cycle or a dieting mindset or simply not prioritizing eating throughout the day, the first thing we do is make sure that they’re getting enough to eat consistently each day.

We do this first to ensure that undereating or deprivation driven eating aren’t masking what feels like emotional eating.

As such, the first thing I’d encourage you to do is check in on whether you may be experiencing this as well, and if so, you’ll likely find it enormously helpful to break free of your dieting mindset and restrictive eating practices.

If you’d like to learn more about the restrict-binge cycle or get help to break free of your dieting mindset or heal emotional eating, you’re invited to book a free Whole Health Strategy call with me so we chat about your goals and the options for support.

Practice Distinguishing Between Emotional and Physical Hunger

Many of the “solutions” diet culture throws at you to stop emotional eating — such as drinking water, committing to not eat after a certain time of day, not bringing certain so-called trigger foods into your home, or distracting yourself — aren’t typically helpful because they don’t help you connect with your body or the why behind you’re eating.

To get better at doing so, you might start out by trying to notice the differences between physical and emotional hunger.

Typically physical hunger:

• Builds more gradually

• Is accompanied by physical sensations in your throat or belly

• May be accompanied by mood or concentration changes

• Occurs when you haven’t eaten much or in awhile

• Is satisfied with food

• Cravings for specific foods aren’t as intense

Emotional hunger on the other hand:

• May come on more suddenly

• Is accompanied by specific emotions, such as boredom, stress, anxiety, anger, or a feeling of wanting to “reward” yourself

• Physical sensations are different and not as specific to a gnawing or emptiness in the belly or throat

• May be felt regardless of when you last ate

• May be linked intense or specific food cravings

• Is less likely to be satisfied by eating

The better you can get at distinguishing between physical and emotional hunger and connecting to what they feel like in your body, the easier it will be to find other ways of coping with your emotions in a helpful way.

Get Curious About Your Emotional Eating Triggers

Believe it or not, many of us are not in tune with our emotions.

Brené Brown cited a fascinating study for her book Atlas of the Heart, which found that, on average, out of 87 different human emotions, in the moment of feeling them, most people can only identify three distinct ones (anger, happiness, and sadness).

I love to share emotional word wheels with my clients to help them get more in touch or specific with what they’re feeling, and of course working with a mental health therapist is another great way to explore and understand your emotions.

Coupled with that, to interrupt the pattern of automatically reaching for food to cope with your emotions, you’ll need to also get curious about and observe your most common emotional eating triggers.

Keeping a food and mood journal is a great way to get in touch with what you’re feeling and when you’re most likely to experience emotional hunger.

Build Your Emotional Eating and Self-Care Toolbox

Rather than thinking about how to stop emotional eating, I support my clients to practice an add-in approach to emotional eating (and really, nutrition in general).

As you do the work of connecting more deeply to your body, your emotions, and your most vulnerable emotional eating triggers, you can also build a robust toolbox of other ways of coping with what you’re feeling in addition to food.

As we discussed, food IS one way of coping with emotions. But likely, there are other ways that you’ll find much more helpful over the long term.

There are many specific tools and practices I share with my clients and help them learn and practice, including mindfulness and mindful eating, among others. One thing that I find enormously helpful is to help them brainstorm ahead of time different self-care activities they can turn to or experiment with when they need specific emotional support.

When you take the time to do this, you can turn to your list in the moment of need, choose an activity, and see if it’s helpful.

For example, when you’re feeling stressed, you might consider:

• Doing a 5-minute grounding meditation

• Deep belly breathing exercises

• Going for a quick walk or some other fun movement

• Getting out in nature or the sunshine

• Calling a friend

• Journaling

• Doing an adult coloring book or Zentangle activity

• Doing a creative project such as knitting, playing an instrument, painting, drawing, scrapbooking, etc.

You can write down ideas for a range of emotional needs you’re likely to experience and practice using them when you’re experiencing the pull to emotionally eat.

The Most Helpful Way to Think About Emotional Eating 

If you take away just one thing from this article, let it be this… emotional eating isn’t inherently bad and you’re not a bad person if you struggle with it.

Also, your goal doesn’t have to be to stop emotionally eating altogether, but rather to find other, additional ways of coping with your emotions with kindness (incidentally, this is one of the 10 principles of Intuitive Eating).

I like to think of emotional eating as an early warning sign that you have an unmet need. If you struggle with a dieting mindset, that need may be (at least in part, urgent physical hunger) or, of course, you may be experiencing an emotional need.

Investigating your emotions, eating, or habits with curiosity will help you better understand the why behind your eating — and what you may need. Likewise, prioritizing your emotional and physical health and self-care is another essential step to addressing those needs.

Would you like support to get out of the dieting cycle… to explore and address your emotional eating struggles… or to prioritize your nutrition, health, and self-care? If so, I invite you to book a FREE Whole Health Strategy call with me here. On the call, we’ll chat about your unique challenges and goals, and I can share the different options for working together, including private and group nutrition and Intuitive Eating coaching.