The 3 Main Triggers of Emotional Eating from a Psychotherapist
Discover some great helpful Tips on Emotional Eating & Mindful Habits from Zing Wellbeing, Psychotherapist & Counsellor, Shara Smith.
Shara explains how emotional eating is common and not a sign of weakness, but a signal for comfort.
Key triggers include stress, fatigue, and loneliness.
Practical strategies to combat emotional eating include substituting unhealthy foods with healthier alternatives, creating wind-down rituals, and planning meals.
Mindful eating practices, such as pausing before eating, slowing down, and changing the environment, were also recommended by Shara.
Shara says as a busy mum, daughter, sister, friend, wife, food can often become more than just fuel, okay, it becomes comfort.
It becomes a coping tool, and also sometimes a reward at the end of a really long day, if we think about it.
Join Zing Wellbeing to access the 7-Day Behaviour Change Challenge with Shara.
Emotional eating is incredibly common, and we've all done it at some point in our lives.
It's about understanding ourselves better and recognizing what drives our choices and learning how to build mindful habits that will nourish our bodies and our minds.
So, what is emotional eating?
You may think you know, but emotional eating, yes, is eating in response to your feelings, rather than hunger.
For a lot of people, it might look like reaching for biscuits when there's chaos going on, it might be eating chocolate late at night after a really long day.
It can be over indulging, you know, on those special occasions, birthday parties or even weekends, and then you start to feel that regret afterwards.
Research tells us that emotional eating is linked to stress and mood regulation.
Why do women eat emotionally? The study found that women actually turn to food as a way to regulate negative emotions like anxiety, and sadness.
But it's also a learned strategy as well, right? And it's a strategy that helps us soothe short term but it often leads to guilt and further stress.
Remember, emotional eating is not a weakness, it's really a signal that our body and our mind are giving us, saying, I need comfort, and the challenge is finding healthier ways to give yourself that comfort.
Read more: Emotional Eating vs. Mindful Eating
The 3 Main Triggers of Emotional Eating
Identify your triggers
The first step is awareness, recognizing those emotional triggers, because emotional eating doesn't happen just randomly, right? It's got triggers.
We're not doing it just because we all have, you know, certain triggers.
Stress overwhelm
When we are stressed our bodies release cortisol, right? Cortisol increases cravings for sugary, fatty foods, a study done by Adam and EPO, showed that women under chronic stress are more likely to crave high calorie comfort foods, so women who are chronically stressed, so it's not just a one off, it's that repeated exposure to stress, we're more likely to crave those fatty, sugary comforting foods.
We're never going to be craving, you know, an apple or or a stick of celery when we're when we're finding it really hard to cope with the chaos that's happening.
Fatigue and exhaustion
The second most common reason that women emotionally eat is fatigue and exhaustion.
Now show me any woman, mother, homemaker, caregiver, that has not felt fatigue and exhaustion, and I will be very, very surprised.
Sleep deprivation can alter hunger hormones.
What it does is it reduces leptin, which is your fullness signal, right, and it increases ghrelin, which is your hunger hormone.
Making sure that we are getting eight hours a day, I think it's really important.
Eight hours is rule of thumb. It really depends on your body and you and who you are.
Some people may need somewhere between seven to eight hours, right?
Really making sure you understand your body, understand what's right for you, because there's no one size fits all here. Okay?
It depends. Also for women on, you know where you are in your cycle, okay?
You know, if you're in your luteal phase, then it might be different for you. So just making sure you understand yourself and your body and not comparing to anyone else.
Loneliness and isolation
The other major issue to do with emotional eating, and why we can emotionally eat, is loneliness and isolation. Motherhood can be really isolating, right, especially in those early years.
Some of you are in it right now, some of you have gone past it, and food can often become a substitute for social connection.
Think back to when we had covid, right? I remember being at probably my lowest point in terms of my own physical health. The gyms were closed. I was not allowed to go outside unless it was, I think, five kilometers from your from your point of address, so I found myself developing a very dependent relationship on food, and you know the effects of that?
I'm still heavier than I ever was because of covid, and I am trying to go to the gym and eat healthier so I am getting better, but I'm not putting that pressure on myself.
What I'm trying to do is figure out why I have connected with food in such a way, and a lot of that was loneliness or isolation that all of us found ourselves in post and during COVID.
Why did you indulge?
Shara says take a moment to think about when was your last episode of over indulging, or overeating? Think about that, and think about what happened beforehand?
Were you stressed? Were you tired? Were you bored? Were you celebrating?
There is power in recognizing that, because once you know your triggers, then you can prepare for them, right?
Kids in bed, time for a reward?
Are evenings your downfall because you’re exhausted. So already you're vulnerable.
Because you're tired, kids are in bed, so you haven't got the distraction, you haven't got the chaos that you've got to fix and focus on. I'm relieved, I'm bored. I also want to reward myself, because it's been a big day, right? So what do we do then?
So if you crave chocolate, I often say to clients, you can have that, but let's substitute it for, say, almond milk and hot cocoa, right?
Instead of eating a chocolate, which it's never just one right? It's never just one square, or a couple of squares. Always ends up being the whole block, most of the block, and then you start with that guilty feeling.
Substitute that with milk and hot cocoa, for example, with a little bit of honey or a little bit of sugar if you want a crunch, right?
Try air popped popcorn instead of a bag of chip, and they can be calorie controlled, if you're finding that it's the whole sort of routine that really helps you then create a wind down ritual.
Create a wind down ritual
Your kids are in bed, so you would go brush your teeth, might put a candle on, you might put music on, right?
But what you're trying to do is figure out rituals, routines that tell your brain it's time for bed, not time to eat, not time to crave it's time for bed.
This is not going to happen overnight. It's something that you need to do consistently.
So for me, I will listen to a podcast. Once I start listening to podcasts, it's almost like I get really sleepy and I know, and it's like my brain is telling my body, right, it's time for bed.
Making sure you have that ritual for you and making sure it's relevant for your life, but also being consistent, so you can tell your brain, hey, it's not time to eat, it's time to go to bed.
Weekends
When we don't have that usually routine, a good way to sort of mitigate that is plan meals.
Plan your meals ahead of time, so you're not grazing all day, right?
Make sure you've got food in the fridge that is healthy. So when you come back from the morning sport run or whatever it is you've got going on, you go straight to the fridge and you're not snacking. You're not making bad choices. You can see what you've got. It's just a matter of putting it in the microwave and eating it.
Habit loops
There's a lot of research around habit loops.
We know that habits are triggered by cues, which is why it's really important to be consistent in that habits are triggered by cues and repeated behaviors and by planning, you know, these swaps and then doing that consistently, what we're doing is rewiring our brain's association with the stress or the celebration, whatever the trigger is.
We're rewiring, wiring our brain to actually not crave that food, right?
Once we start getting into consistency and and finding those triggers, creating our cues, it's going to become easier.
But the key there is to find out what your triggers are. Create your cues.
When you start engaging in your swaps, and you will be consistent and learn over time.
Guilt spiral
The danger when we slip up is not the slipping up, it's the spiral that we get into.
It's that guilt spiral. "Oh, I blew it. I might as well eat what I want for the rest of the week."
It's really that all or nothing type mentality that's what keeps us stuck right.
So instead of focusing on that guilt once we slip up, try practicing the reset with that guilt strategy.
What does that mean?
Pause! I want you guys, when you slip up to notice, but without judgment.
So instead of saying "I ate more than I planned, I'm a failure. I might as well eat it all." That's judgment.
Instead think, " I ate more than I planned." That is noticing without judgment, okay?
The second thing you need to do in your reset without guilty is refrain, right?
Remind yourself one meal doesn't define me. Okay, so I slipped up. One slip up doesn't define my weeks or my days of hard work, and it shouldn't.
As humans, we have this mindset or this capability to focus on the negative.
You might have five days of consistent eating, and the sixth day you slip up. And then what you might find is if you feel guilty about that, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the 10th day you're complete, just giving into it.
That's where the problem lies. If you slip up on that sixth day, reset without guilt.
Know this, without judgment and reframe. The last thing you need to do is reset. Make the next choice a nourishing one.
On that sixth day you've you've slipped up, that's okay, let's just focus on the fact that you did, and move on, and what you'll find is you'll be teaching yourself Self Compassion, and self compassion is more more important.
It's also more effective than guilt, because research shows that people who practice self compassion after overeating were less likely to continue binging compared to those who felt guilt and shame.
It's really important to try and be kind to ourselves, because if you want to move forward, self compassion is going to be far more effective than feeling guilty.
Watch Shara's video below on emotional eating