1) When do you emotionally eat? Is there a time of day that it strikes? For most people, the answer seems to be afternoon and evening. Although some people report nighttime eating – they will actually wake up and go eat in the middle of the night.
2) What do you eat? Emotional eaters tend to crave one of four things in my experience: high fat foods (e.g., Fried chicken, Sausage, Hot dog, Fried fish, Bacon, Steak), Sweets (e.g., Cake, Cinnamon Rolls, Ice cream, Cookies, Chocolate, Donuts, Candy, Brownies), Complex Carbohydrates (e.g., Sandwich bread, Rice, Biscuits, Pasta, Pancakes or Waffles, Rolls, Cereal), or Fast Food (e.g., Pizza, French fries, Hamburger, Chips). Sweets and Carbs seem to top that list, as do a combination of Sweet and Fat (e.g., Oreos).
3) Why do you emotional eat? What emotion actually triggered the episode? Was it boredom,anger, shame, fear, guilt, or loneliness? Find out what the ROOT CAUSE of it is. Is there something in your life that causes you stress, anxiety, or depression? Do you associate yourself with negative people, surroundings or situations?
If so, REMOVE yourself or these people or things from your life. If it's unhealthy, it must go! Unhealthy relationships, no matter what form they're in, will only produce negativity in ALL areas of your life!
Or it may possibly be something deep in your past life that you have had to bear the scars of something terrible. This is much harder to deal with and to fix, but I know it can be done. You have to make yourself understand that food is not making your life "fix" anything. In reality, it causes more problems.
It will make you feel more guilty after you continuously emotionally eat.
Some situations may require therapy, but TRY to find and fix the ROOT CAUSE. You will see a world of difference!
The answers to these questions should give you some insight into the circumstances that lead you to emotional eating. Of course, the bigger concern is how to stop. It boils down to this: if you are using food as a coping mechanism, you need to find another, more productive way to cope.
Emotional eating usually falls into one (or both) of two common (but usually ineffective) coping strategies: avoidant or emotion-focused coping. Avoidant coping is just what the name implies – you avoid dealing with the stressor. Eating when you are stressed so you don’t have to deal with the problem is an example of avoidant coping using food. As you might imagine, avoidant coping is rarely effective as the problem is still going to be there once you’ve stopped eating.
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Emotion-focused coping using food can be equally ineffective. When we engage in emotion-focused coping, we are attempting to make ourselves feel better by addressing the emotions the stressor provoked rather than the stressor itself. So if you get in a fight with your significant other and, instead of talking it out, decide to comfort your hurt feelings by consuming a chocolate cake, that would be an example of emotion-focused coping using food. Again, not super helpful in this situation. While you might feel better after eating (or not – you might feel guilty if you eat something you have labeled as “bad” or eaten too much), you still haven’t fixed your problem.
I know, I know. That sounds great, but how can you make that change? I’m going to warn you: it’s not going to happen overnight. If you’ve been turning to food as your primary coping mechanism for 40 years, you can’t expect it to go away overnight. I wish it was that simple, but for most of us, it’s not.
It took me a LONG time to realize I was an emotional eater! And it was a horrible cycle to break! But one day I realized that cycle I was in was making me more and more depressed! I HAD to change. I could NOT let this control ME, I HAD to control IT!
It was a process, but I am cured of it and now I actually turn AWAY from eating, where as before I would turn TO it. Search yourself and find the answers to your root-problem. Just remember, it's NOT food!
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