Introduction
Comfort eating refers to consuming particular foods or comfort foods to alleviate discomfort or satisfy emotional demands. It is eating as a way to suppress or soothe negative emotions, including anxiety, fear, anger, boredom, melancholy, and loneliness.
Repetitive emotional eating can cause a variety of health-related problems. Diabetes, hypertension, tiredness, and high blood pressure are just a few conditions that can result from binge eating. Indulging in emotional eating can also cause guilt or nausea after realizing that you’ve eaten too much food.
Understanding Comfort Eating
The relationship between food and our emotions is not one that many of us make. However, people may take action to reduce or stop comfort eating by being aware of what causes it.
Here are Emotional Situations That Trigger Overeating
Stress
A stressful situation causes the body to generate the hormone cortisol, which aids in self-defense. Cortisol levels can boost food intake, fat storage, and weight gain if they are raised for a long time, as they are when there are frequent and continuous stresses.
Fear or Anxiety
Overeating may result in feeling anxious, especially if you realize that it makes you feel better after you eat. If you feel tension, fear, worry, agitation, and panic, the tendency is that you might turn to your comfort foods to calm yourself.
Boredom
Even those who are not emotional eaters will occasionally eat when they are bored and have nothing better to do. Ever so often, it’s common to experience an impulse to eat when you’re bored. However, if your mental or physical health is being negatively impacted by boredom eating, with side effects like weight gain and anxiety, you may be seeking a strategy to quit.
Poor Self-Esteem
In an effort to combat their sense of worthlessness, people who struggle with low self-esteem work particularly hard to regulate their appearance, weight, and eating habits. In this situation, overeating is an act of self-hatred and a way to get back at yourself. Thoughts like “Why can’t I control myself and lose weight, I feel like a failure, and I’m not good enough ” might be one of the numerous emotions that trigger binge eating.
Anger
Food can temporarily mask unpleasant feelings, such as your frustrations, in the present, but this is only a temporary fix. Your anger will eventually return, and when it does, it will probably be accompanied by additional depressing feelings like guilt or embarrassment about overindulging.
Sadness
Due to the brain’s reward regions being activated by comfort food, eating is a simple approach to improving your mood. Even if you are not hungry, this encourages you to consume more of the enjoyable meal. However, eating doesn’t deal with the real problem, even if it could seem like a means to cope with your sadness.
Happiness
Yup, it’s not just negative emotions that trigger emotional eating. A satisfying meal is a staple of every celebration. This is what we learned from childhood, so it becomes challenging to separate food from emotions. But it’s time to discover alternative methods to celebrate when using food as a reward leads to persistent excess.
Identifying Your Triggers
It is important to recognize your emotional eating tendencies so you can stop yourself from making it a habit that can become a bigger problem in the future.
The main advice we can give you is to keep a food diary that tracks not just what you’re eating but also your emotions. Track down what you’re feeling before you eat, while you’re eating, and after you eat. In time, you will gather enough data and see certain patterns. For example, you notice that you tend to order fast food when you can’t figure out something at work or eat sweets when you feel alone.
Ways To Stop Comfort Eating
Listen to Your Body
Are you hungry (with a growling stomach) or just looking for comfort? If you’re bored, try distracting yourself by watching a movie or sightseeing in the park. If you’re feeling anxious, try to meditate and calm your mind.
Avoid Getting Distracted When Eating
We are more prone to overeat when we are preoccupied when eating, such as when we are using our phones or watching the television. This is a result of the fact that we are not listening to our bodies and are unaware of whether we are hungry or full.
Eat Slowly
It may take up to 20 minutes after you begin eating before your body sends signals to your brain that make you feel satiated. Your brain cannot get the fullness message when you eat too quickly, which might lead to overeating. Give yourself enough time to savor each bite. This does not just make every meal enjoyable but can also help you tell when you are full.
Learn When to Stop
You don’t have to finish your plate if you’re already full. If you’re worried about food waste, you can save and eat the rest of your meal or snack later.
Seek Support
Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Increases in oxytocin levels, a hormone that lowers anxiety and stress levels, are linked to adequate levels of social support. You can even join stress or comfort eating help groups.
Practice Self-Compassion
Keep in mind that it might take some time and effort to overcome the habit of stress eating. Stressing yourself about your emotional eating habits can, ironically, lead to emotional eating or other eating disorders. Be nice, take care of yourself, and celebrate small victories when they occur.
Recognizing your emotional eating triggers is the first step to breaking the cycle and can help you stop comfort eating. And by taking action towards breaking your emotional eating habits, you can begin to make a healthier relationship with food.
