What is meant by Emotional Eating?
by Dr Jacques Lubbe PhD
Emotional eating is when someone eats in response to emotional feelings instead of a hunger response or for nutritional nourishment. There are a number of reasons behind emotional eating. Many times, it is related to one’s natural strategy of coping with stress. By way of example: a twin sister gets engaged and married, leaving the other twin feeling lonely and insignificant. To cope with the stress of being left “on the shelf”, she may “pig out” or in other words, eat excessively. Of course, a correct course of action might be to go out and make new friends, actively look for a partner or take up a hobby. Instead, she may start binge-eating to distract her from being lonely.
Identifying her eating cues and changing her responses to these cues is very important if she wants to control her emotional eating. For emotional eaters, eating alleviates negative emotions. It can also help to escape or divert one’s attention from an ego-threatening situation that can cause aversive self-awareness. Emotional eating is a way to escape this aversive awareness by focusing the attention on external stimulations. Emotional eaters’ coping strategies or mechanisms fail them and they overeat to temporarily provide comfort and distraction.
Here are three basic stress coping strategies:
Emotional-oriented coping: When actions are directed at changing emotional responses to stress, including attempts to reframe a problem to elicit a less stressful reaction. Task-oriented coping: When direct action is taken to alter the situation to reduce the amount of stress the situation evokes. Avoidance-oriented coping: Where stressful situations are avoided or the existence of a stressful situation is denied by losing hope.
Who is at risk?
Women are especially prone to emotional eating. Under normal circumstances, physiological responses to negative emotions and stress mimic internal sensations associated with eating induced fullness or satiety. Loss of appetite and reduced food intake are associated with negative emotions. An increase in food intake is an inappropriate reaction to negative emotions and stress. Emotional eating is attributed to individual characteristics and is an exception to the norm.