What is Emotional Eating?

Emotional eating is the practice of consuming food in response to feelings instead of biological hunger. Just about everyone uses food to regulate their emotions to some degree. When eating to self-soothe becomes your primary means of coping with stress and takes up much of your time and energy, it is emotional eating. Restrictive eating can also be a way of calming yourself or feeling in control of your emotions.

Emotional Hunger vs. Physical Hunger - review this list to see which sound more true for you.

Many issues with food aren’t really about food at all. They’re about self-soothing; ways of calming your body and mind. Often this is a way of distracting yourself vs. focusing on whatever is bothering you – your feelings. While this may take the edge off stress in the short-term, it can become an addiction or an Eating Disorder in the long-term. Click here to read more about what causes eating disorders. Even if you don’t have a full-blown eating disorder, you may be missing out on living while you spend all your time dieting!

Eating disorders - such as anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder – include extreme emotions, attitudes, and behaviors surrounding weight and food issues. Eating disorders are serious emotional and physical problems that can have life-threatening consequences. 

What’s needed is a way to cope with and endure uncomfortable feelings vs. finding ways to get rid of them or control them. If you’re like many people feeling out of control with food, the knee-jerk reaction is to try and control food, for example, through dieting. Diets don’t work! Instead, we recommend a combination of mental health, medical, and nutritional therapy. For emotional eaters, particularly those who have tried dieting unsuccessfully, we recommend a process called Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works.

What is Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive Eating is an approach developed by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD and Elyse Resch, MS, RD, FADA that teaches you how to create a healthy relationship with your food, mind, and body–where you ultimately become the expert of your own body. You learn how to distinguish between physical and emotional feelings, and gain a sense of body wisdom. It’s also a process of making peace with food–so that you no longer have constant “food worry” thoughts. It’s knowing that your health and your worth as a person does not change because you ate a so-called “bad” or “fattening” food.

10 Principles of Intuitive Eating

Are you an Intuitive Eater?

Take this quiz and find out how much of an intuitive eater you are.