Healthy weight

Emotional eating — healing starts with awareness

by Marcelle Pick, OB/GYN NP

In my years as a healthcare provider, I have talked to thousands of women who are distressed about their weight. I always ask lots of questions about a patient’s history with food, and how she feels about eating in general. That’s because our emotions and how we eat (and when and what) are so intertwined that it is next to impossible for a woman to get healthy — and, eventually, to lose weight — without first addressing her emotional attachment to food.

When you are upset, do you turn immediately to food? You may be using food to “medicate” yourself in response to an emotional stimulus, and for that first moment, eating might take your mind off your problem. But in addition to the problem that caused your emotional eating, you’ll also feel guilty and unhappy about what or how much you have just eaten, which compounds the problem exponentially.

Emotional eating has its roots in actual emotions. Women tell me they eat spontaneously when they are:

• Angry
• Sad
• Ashamed
• Disgusted
• Scared
• Lonely
• Jealous
• Restless
• Bored

And the list goes on.

The bottom line is, women frequently use food to feel better emotionally. If that sounds familiar, this article is for you. I want you to know that if you’re an emotional eater, there’s plenty of reason for hope — you can find a new perspective on eating. You can learn to choose when and what you eat instead of just eating impulsively during an emotional event. Yes, it’s a change process with way stations along the path, but I promise you, it is entirely possible to accomplish.

Food cravings aren’t about self-control

Emotional eating issues and attachments to food — your subconscious feelings about it — are unique to the individual. Many diet “experts” say women gain weight because they comfort themselves with food, sometimes to excess. This can trigger waves of guilt and disgust for many women, who come to believe they are just compulsive overeaters with no self-control. But it isn’t true. Real compulsive overeaters eat because they are in the middle of an emotional emergency and are desperate to quiet what is actually emotional “hunger.” Yet there are plenty of women who have strong cravings for certain foods not from a psychological need, but from a physiologic sensitivity.

Cravings for specific foods — gluten and sugar are two of the most common culprits — often signal a sensitivity or even allergy to those foods. So your inability to pass on dessert or a freshly baked dinner roll doesn’t necessarily mean you’re “compulsive,” “weak-willed,” or exhibiting a shameful “lack of control.” Instead, it could mean you have a physiologic sensitivity to sugar or gluten (or both!) that is driving you to want those foods. (We have articles about gluten and sugar and how they affect your health and your weight that you can read for more information.) But take it from me, if you remove gluten or sugar from your diet, the physical — and emotional — transformation that can occur is astonishing, and wonderful.

We all comfort ourselves with food sometimes but it’s the degree to which we do so that is significant. When does it become a genuine problem in our lives? For most women, the threads of our relationships with food and the act of eating can be endlessly intricate, and they are woven deeply into our emotional composition. Strong — perhaps even lifelong — connections with food often trace directly to our childhoods.

What’s the connection?

If, as a little girl, your “voice” was often squelched, you were ridiculed or made fun of for your thoughts or behavior, or you were frequently shamed, it’s logical that you would turn to food for solace. As a child you probably had little recourse, and the behavior served its purpose. But now, as an adult, you could be mechanically following those same patterns without realizing it. It’s likely you have also developed the habit of blaming, and probably punishing, yourself for eating under these circumstances.

Women should understand that emotional eating and food issues exist on a wide continuum, with extreme over-eaters at one end and severe under-eaters at the other. As hard as it might be to comprehend how slim women can still consider themselves too heavy, there are many who do. Across the spectrum of emotional eaters, adverse childhood associations can sometimes manifest as serious eating disorders much later in life.

Women with eating disorders often connect the food they eat directly to their body image. They create an equation between their “ugly” this or that body part and food. Sadly, these women think they can “just stop eating” at any time to improve the way they look.

For women and girls with anorexia or bulimia, there is an uncontrollable urge to limit what they eat, or to “purge” its aftereffects. These unhealthy patterns help maintain an uneasy sense of control over life that allows the sufferer to avoid facing the emotional pain so often at the heart of her disorder.

(If you suffer from an eating disorder, such as chronic overeating, anorexia, or bingeing/purging, you may need professional assistance to overcome your problem. I recommend trying to find a holistic healthcare provider, and don’t wait to get help — your health, both physical and emotional, depends on it.)

Can childhood memories make you gain weight?

Each day I hear all kinds of stories about women’s emotional attachments to food. For many of my patients, these memories are fond ones: the tinkling bell of the ice cream truck on a hot summer day, sitting down to a traditional holiday feast with family, the fresh-from-the-oven cookie that gave comfort during a sad moment. These stories underscore how food can soothe us and make us feel connected and loved. In many families, food is the only currency of love, a legacy many women unwittingly pass on to their own daughters (and sons).

Or just as often, the opposite might have occurred. Mealtimes may have been chaotic and upsetting, or perhaps even excruciating exercises in parental control. Your siblings may have also played roles in unpleasant childhood memories of family meals. Some children are forced to eat everything on their plates, or they sit down to a meal only to hear, “I have a bone to pick with you!” It’s easy to see how persecution, confrontation, and conflict during dinnertime can encode unhealthy eating patterns that persist into adulthood.

Whether her memories are good or bad, a woman is often unaware that these associations could lie at the root of her love affair with food, even if the relationship is quite tempestuous. How do these remote childhood memories present themselves later in life? In any number of ways: as food disorders, bingeing, overeating, “yo-yo” dieting, even exercising compulsively.

Adolescence for girls — food is public enemy #1

As girls move into adolescence, their stories often morph into tales of deprivation and triumph over food, the perceived enemy. One of my patients describes how she and her girlfriends ate one meal a day all through their senior year in high school, squeezing each others’ hands in support, so they could fit into tiny little prom dresses in June. Another remembers lambasting herself if she ate more than half a yogurt container for lunch. Often adolescence for girls is the entry into what may become a lifetime of self-loathing, all for wanting and needing to do something that is a vital necessity — eat!

Our society has few rituals in place to make teenage girls feel comfortable with their emerging curves. From an early age, girls are blasted with advertising messages that highlight ideal body images which are unattainable for most of us. Thin is in, and anybody who is more than skinny-as-a-rail is considered “fat.” As a result, girls often enter womanhood ashamed of their bodies, which of course affects how they eat. If a woman never feels comfortable with her grown-up shape, she will probably find herself in an ongoing struggle with food and self-esteem.

Fast forward to midlife

Eating disorders aren’t the exclusive domain of young women. In their book, Runaway Eating, Cynthia Bulik and Nadine Taylor help clarify why so many women in their 40’s and early 50’s find themselves coping with midlife stress through unhealthful eating patterns. Even without a diagnosed disorder, a woman may become nearly obsessed with maintaining control, not only of her food intake, but of the other areas of her life as well. Emotional attachment to systematic denial — of food, pleasure, money, sleep, and even sex — is anorexia in another guise. It is an effort to erase a part of yourself or your life that weakens your sense of control.

And women aren’t the only ones doing the erasing. Just look at what has happened to dress sizes in the past 40 years. You may know that you are really a “12” even though designers are sewing size “6” labels into your clothes these days. And what’s with size “0,” “00” and “000,” anyway? Do women need to fully disappear to be truly attractive?

Stress and emotional eating

It won’t surprise you to know that stress, and how you react to it, can be tangled up in your eating patterns. Stress presses your body’s panic button, and unleashes a cascade of internal chemical reactions that affect your feelings and your body. Stress activates your fight-or-flight response with the release of adrenaline and cortisol. This process can alter your digestion and your relationship with food. If you stay stressed for long periods, your body’s daily cortisol cycle will spiral out of whack, upsetting the normal internal conversation. Chronic stress allows these effects to continue indefinitely.

While we all have stress in our lives, each of us will respond to it differently and that includes how, when, and what we choose to eat. If a woman believes that showing her feelings is a sign of weakness, she might use food to hide that fear. Some women become obsessive-compulsive, and use strict food management to gain a sense of control over a stressful situation, especially one which is ongoing. Others retreat from stress, taking comfort in their favorite foods.

Whether we are using well-loved foods to calm ourselves, or depriving ourselves of them as punishment, we are preoccupying ourselves with food to prevent unwanted feelings, including — but not limited to — the big ones: anger, fear, despair, and shame.

Is it emotional or physiological — or both?

As children, many of us were rewarded with sweets for being “good girls.” Many women unconsciously mimic this reassurance by rewarding themselves with comfort food that’s filled with sugar or other refined carbs. But there’s a physiological pull at work here as well. Sweet treats trigger the release of serotonin, the feel-good hormone, though it’s only temporary.

Certain eating practices which are traditionally thought to be “emotional” may have genuine physical underpinnings. Hormonal imbalance and neurotransmitter imbalance can both spark insatiable cravings which connect strongly to emotional eating habits. Food sensitivities can also be at play: we crave the very foods we are sensitive to because we’ve grown used the abnormal biochemical state those foods produce. Once our pathways grow accustomed to behaving in a certain way, they tend to get stuck, even if it’s not the healthiest place to be. In my practice, gluten is the top culprit here, particularly because it is found in so many of our everyday foods and so many women are sensitive to it.

I use a wide range of tests to help diagnose neurochemical and other types of internal imbalance. I’ve had good success in treating these patients with targeted support in the form of amino acids, vitamins, herbs and mineral cofactors. I can attest to the fact that healing imbalances (which often involves eliminating problem foods) is incredibly effective at reducing irresistible cravings for comfort foods. If you can resolve any imbalance and find a way to come to terms with your emotional relationship with food, you’ve got an unbeatable strategy which can put you on the road to physical wellness, optimal weight management, and emotional freedom.

What are you really hungry for?

Most women who struggle with emotions and food concerns actually hunger for deeper sustenance — it’s a psychological yearning they feed with food. At Women to Women, we call this your “black box.” Recognizing that you have this void — and that no amount of food will fill it — is a great first step toward dealing with your emotions and food.

What I notice in so many women is that they often get angry at themselves for “pigging out” and they feel guilty about eating in general. They frequently blame food instead of the upsetting situation that might have triggered an eating episode. It’s much harder to control your emotions than your food; plus, food masks the feeling and doesn’t talk back. On the other hand, food deprivation holds a false appeal, too. For some women, depriving themselves of food feels very virtuous while it lasts, but often ends in binge-eating with its familiar side dish of remorse.

Think before you eat

The very first key to healing the underlying pain of emotional eating is awareness. Next time you find yourself using food as a soothing mechanism or control device, ask yourself, What set me off? What was I feeling in the beginning, before I ate, and how do I feel now? Even if this doesn’t stop you in the moment, examining your feelings will remind you that you have a choice.

Many women don’t realize the degree to which food issues affect their physical and emotional health. But it’s critically important to uncover your unique emotional link to food in order to reset that connection, and move on. Finding someone with whom you can discuss this can help decode and reverse these health-sabotaging behaviors.

Other helpful tools:

• When you have the overwhelming urge to eat something, try to stop and ask yourself if you really want that particular food or if you want to eat purely out of habit, or to satisfy some type of emotional hunger. This stop-and-think technique genuinely helps raise awareness and becomes much easier to use as you get used to it. Switching your kitchen around helps, too because when you move foods to different shelves and cupboards, you’ll force yourself to pause before you eat.
• As you begin to work through emotional issues and try to choose healthier foods, don’t worry too much about portion size! I think some traditional organizations for eating issues overemphasize portion control. This can be a difficult habit to break, especially if you’ve been counting and measuring and weighing for years. It’s good to learn how to let go of rigid control mechanisms that perpetuate unhealthy emotional eating patterns.
• Explore The Core Balance Diet to help determine the scope of your emotional relationship with food, and eating itself. This is an important part of our journey to become more aware of the habitual actions we take every day. Understanding the ways in which we try to fill our emotional needs with food is crucial to breaking that pattern and learning to eat for sustenance. Consider enrolling in one of Geneen Roth’s workshops. Roth, author of Feeding the Hungry Heart and When Food Is Love, runs seminars around the country specifically designed to help people with eating disorders and other food-related issues.
• Investigate Emotional Freedom Techniques. These methods have proven very helpful for eating disorders and other types of emotional eating.

We’re all at the table together

So keep one thing in mind if you recognize emotional eating patterns in yourself: you are not alone. At one time or another, almost every woman has faced some of these concerns. The important thing to realize is that many of these adverse patterns are set in childhood and are often associated with buried emotional pain. They can be very difficult to break, but there is hope.

Your emotional eating patterns are not etched in stone and you don’t need to deprive yourself of delicious, satisfying food by “dieting” forever. If you take one thing away from this discussion, it should be the importance of awareness. Stop and notice how you feel when you are about to eat anything. This one step truly opens the door to understanding and healing even the most persistent emotional eating patterns.

For more information about emotions, weight loss, and healing core imbalances, I also encourage you to read the following articles on our website:

• How your emotional experience determines your health
• The Core Balance Diet — how core imbalances can affect your weight and health
• Eating to support your adrenals — small choices can make a difference
• Allergies and sensitivities — causes and solutions
• Personal Program Nutritional and Lifestyle Guidelines

For information about the power of emotional healing, investigate The Hoffman Quadrinity Process. These in-depth workshops can help identify and heal core emotional issues. This process focuses on integrating your intellect, emotions, body, and spirit, and can show you how to knock out chronic stress permanently.

Our Personal Program for Core Balance is a great place to start

The Personal Program for Core Balance helps rebalance your body to promote natural and lasting weight loss. At the heart of our Program is The Core Balance Diet, an eating plan designed to provide the body with the foundation it needs to lose pounds along with the digestive and nutritional support needed to maintain a healthy weight.

• To learn more about the Program, go to How the Program works.
• To learn if the weight loss approach in the Personal Program for Core Balance will work for you, take our on-line Weight Loss Profile.
• To start taking control of your weight today, sign-up for a risk-free trial.
• If you have questions, don’t hesitate to call us toll-free at 1-800-798-7902. We’re here to listen and to help.

Related to this article:

References & further reading about emotional eating

 

Original Publication Date: 03/30/2006
Last Modified: 08/17/2009