Your Emotional Eating Toolkit.
What is Emotional Eating?
Emotional eating involves eating to comfort or suppress challenging feelings such as stress, anger, fear, boredom, sadness and loneliness. Emotional eating is a very common; most people will engage in some form of emotional eating at some stage in their life.
There is no shame in this, as food can be pleasurable and also very comforting. Foods people tend to choose when they seek comfort are typically high in sugar, fat and salt such as chocolate, crisps and takeaway foods. These foods are referred to as “highly palatable” and can trigger off neurotransmitters in the brain which make us feel good.
Emotional eating is only a problem if it becomes the main or only coping mechanism when you experience stress or challenging emotions. Emotional eating can also lead to binge eating, which some people find distressing, as they often report they feel a lack control when bingeing.
How to Use This Toolkit
Managing emotional eating can be nuanced and tricky. This toolkit is not intended to replace professional support, but rather to give you a starting point with some practical tips to help you on your journey. If you feel your emotional eating is a problem, I strongly encourage you to reach out to an experienced professional for support.
Tool 1 – Food and Mood Diary.
In times of stress and overwhelm, our brains want to take the path of least resistance. Emotional eating is often an “automatic” or “default” behaviour, meaning that there is very little thinking involved in doing it. In order to change our eating behaviours, it is important that we first understand them. Keeping a log of what you’re eating and how you’re feeling can give you some insight into your eating patterns and help you to identify what your emotional eating triggers are. Use the headings below as diary prompts which can help structure your food and mood diary.
Note the time of the you are eating
Note where you are eating
Who are you eating with
What feelings or thoughts come up right before you eat
What is your hunger on a scale of 0-10
Note the type and portion size of the food you eat
What feelings or thoughts come up directly after you eat
What feelings or thoughts are coming up 1 hour after eating
What are you reflections on this eating experience
Tool 2 – The HALTS Method
HALTS is an acronym which stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, Stressed. This is a method for helping you to determine why you’re eating. If you feel a strong urge to eat and are unsure why; pause and ask yourself the questions outlined in the HALTS method:
“Am I.....Hungry?”. Sometimes it’s not emotional eating. Sometimes it’s physical hunger. Look back at your food diary and see if you are skipping meals or not having enough satiating foods throughout the day. Even if the trigger is emotional; physical hunger plus experiencing challenging emotions will significantly increases the likelihood of overeating.
“Am I..... Angry, Lonely, Tired or Stressed?”. If any of these emotions (outside of physical hunger), are triggering you to eat, Tool 3 may help with this.
Tool 3 – Delay, Distract, Decide.
If you’re need to eat is driven by emotions and not physical hunger, that’s ok! As mentioned, emotional eating is common and nothing to be ashamed of. This tool aims to help you put some space between your feelings and your actions before you eat. This helps to reduce the “automatic” or “default” nature of the eating behaviour.
This tool aims to help you surf the wave of the difficult emotion in that moment. If you are suffering from ongoing poor mental health; I strongly recommend to link in with your GP or a mental health professional to get the right support.
Delay.
Delay the decision to eat for between 15 and 30 minutes. Set a timer on your phone.
Distract.
Do something that will occupy your thoughts and attention until the timer goes off. Try do something physical or with your hands.
Some examples: wash dishes, fold some laundry, play a video game, go for a walk, do a workout, make a phone call, do some knitting, do a jigsaw puzzle.
Decide.
After the set time has passed, decide if you are going to eat or not. If you decide to eat, decide what you will eat and how much.
What food am I going to eat right now? Make sure it’s a food that you want to eat and that satisfies your need in that moment.
How much of it will I have? Make sure that you choose a portion of food you know will satisfy you.
Making these decisions before you eat, makes emotional eating a more mindful choice, rather than an automatic behaviour.
Don’t beat yourself up for choosing to eat and make sure you practice self-compassion. Remember, it takes time to change our eating habits.
