A brief guide to tackling emotional eating

Tracking and monitoring

The first step in tackling emotional eating is to track and monitor your eating so you can see the extent of your emotional eating and see if there are any patterns. An eating diary is a great tool for this. Record every time you eat something and most importantly see if you can work out the reasons why you were eating, including any thoughts or feelings you noticed at the time of eating. Often eating diaries are also called food diaries, the important thing when looking at emotional eating is to make sure your diary includes thoughts, feelings and reasons around eating.

Keep a diary like this for several weeks, it will help you recognise your emotional eating and track any progress at tackling it.

Once you have become more aware of your emotional eating through collecting information about when and why it happens, you can see if any patterns emerge. For example, does it happen more when you are at work or home? When you are busy or feel bored? Is it usually in response to one particular emotion such as anger or anxiety or in response to all emotions? Do you experience strong cravings or urges and end up eating lots of food in a short space of time, feeling like you can’t stop eating (this could be binge eating). Do you eat in secret?

Managing the urge to eat

It is likely that in the past you have turned to food without really thinking about it and you need to change this habit. Tracking and monitoring your eating should give you more awareness so that you can start to change the habit of automatically reaching for food in response to emotions. A challenge will be dealing with urges or cravings to eat, however, once you have developed a few strategies this will become easier and easier.

‘Urge Surfing’

The idea is to notice the urge or craving to eat and observe how the urge can get stronger and then subside – perhaps a bit like a wave. Next time you notice the urge to eat, postpone eating but rate how strong the urge feels out of 10 (10 being as strong as you can imagine) and how this changes overtime, so record a rating every five minutes. Most people will observe that the urge to eat declines over time and if you can resist eating then you are ‘surfing the urge’ until the urge is over.

Distraction

While trying to postpone eating distraction might help to take your mind off food. Make a list of simple distraction activities that could allow the minutes to pass while you are ‘surfing an urge’. The list might include playing on your mobile phone, filing your nails, having a bath, doing a crossword or other puzzle, phoning a friend, walking around the block, a memory task (how many friend’s birthdays can you remember or the words to a song). The activities are most useful if they can be done anywhere and anytime.

Stimulus control

This is about limiting the availability of comfort food, so a delay between wanting to eat and being able to eat is enforced in which time the urge or craving may have subsided and you have had chance to consider what is the best thing to do. This can involve not buying or storing comfort foods, leaving your wallet at home, paying for petrol at the pump so you don’t go into the petrol station and see all the snacks for sale. Some people put stickers on their fridge or cupboard doors to prompt them to pause before reaching for the comfort food. Have a think about what might work for you. Perhaps drinking a glass of water instead, or chewing some sugar free gum or brushing your teeth might also create enough of a pause for you to start to break the habit.

Challenge your thinking

While urge surfing, it can be useful to become aware of your positive beliefs about eating. For example, “eating will make me feel better, eating will help me cope”.

You might also notice permissive thoughts such as “I deserve some cake after the day I have had, it will just be this once, one slice of cake won’t make any difference, I didn’t eat much for lunch, if I eat the cake then I can stop thinking about it”. Other common thoughts might be about lacking control, for example “I have no will power, I cannot help it, I am never going to lose weight so why bother, I am destined to be fat”. If you recognise any of these types of thoughts, next time they arise question them, are they accurate? Are they helpful? What else could you think? What thoughts would be more accurate and helpful? It can be helpful to write things down, like in the example below:

Managing emotions differently

This is about responding to emotions in new ways instead of eating. Like any new skill it can take time and practice to achieve but it will mean you have alternative ways of managing emotions so you can reduce your emotional eating.

Take the sting out of the emotion

If asked to rate how strong an emotion feels, with 10/10 being as strong as you can imagine and 0 being not feeling it at all, you are trying to reduce the emotion to being less than 7/10. In the past, you may have used food to take the sting out of the emotion, i.e. to comfort yourself and make it bearable. Now you are looking for other, less destructive things to do this.

Below is a list of some things people find helpful, it can depend on the emotion you are experiencing and the idea is to reduce the strength of an emotion from feeling overwhelming and distressing to feeling more manageable.

• Deep breathing, using relaxation techniques
• Doing some exercise like walking
• Punching or screaming into a pillow
• Crying
• Writing your thoughts and feelings down
• Talking to someone you trust and who is supportive
• Listening to music
• Cleaning
• Do something distracting while the feeling subsides

Name and validate the emotions

Once you have reduced the strength of the emotion, you want to provide yourself with some comfort and kindness. Take on the role of a loving friend who is going to try and understand how you are feeling and acknowledge your feelings. So you might want to think to yourself something along the lines of:

“You are feeling really hurt and let down by the way you have been treated. It is understandable you are going to feel this way, what was said was unfair and hurtful and you did not deserve to be treated in this way. It is ok and understandable to feel angry and scared.”

Work out the source of the emotion

Emotions exist for good reason, they can guide us and protect us if we let them, but first we need to know the emotion we are feeling and then begin to understand why we are feeling that way so we can take appropriate action.

Sometimes it will be pretty obvious what we are feeling and why e.g. we are feeling angry because someone has been unfair to us. Other times we might need to do a bit more thinking and detective work. Clues to the emotion we are feeling can come from our physical response, did our fists clench, do we have butterflies in our stomach, were we feeling hot and sweaty, did tears well up in our eyes? Also what we felt like doing can give us a clue: Did we want to run away? Did we want to hit out? Did we want to cry?

Also the trigger for the emotional response might indicate what emotion it prompted – was there a threat (fear, anxiety and anger)? Was there an injustice (anger)? Was there a loss (sadness)? Was there humiliation (shame)? Did I fail to meet my standards (guilt)? Often we can feel a mix of emotions and our responses) thoughts, feelings, urges and physical sensations) can be individual and personal to us.

We also might need to think about why we had such an emotional response to an event. Was it because it reminded us of something in the past, are we particularly sensitive to this type of thing, are we particularly stressed, tired or overwhelmed at the moment? All this thinking is best done once the emotion has subsided a bit but once we feel we understand our response a bit better we can then work out what might be the best thing to do.

Taking action

Perhaps we now have worked out why we had such a strong emotional response to a situation, this puts us in a good position to then figure out what to do next. One thing we have probably realised by now is that eating high fat or high sugar foods is not really going to solve the problem. If we are anxious, worried or scared perhaps we need to realistically assess the threat and our ability to cope, are we overestimating the danger and underestimating our strengths? Can we do anything to reduce the threat or increase our ability to cope?

If we are bored or lonely what actions can we take to make life more fulfilling, feel more connected or feel more content on our own? If we feel angry, hurt or humiliated who can we complain to and obtain justice from? If we are sad and experiencing loss, how can we comfort ourselves, grieve our loss and find a way to move on? Sometimes there are specific things we can do, other times we need to accept things we cannot change; often we need to decide which of these paths is for the best and this can be very hard.

When you might need more help

For some people it will be a real challenge to recognising what emotions they are feeling and eating in response to. Sometimes we have become so used to numbing our emotions that we are not so aware of what we are feeling, or perhaps we have never really been able to tell what we are feeling. If this is the case, an extra step will be able learning to recognise, name and identify different emotions. This can feel daunting because we are worried how powerful and overwhelming an emotion might feel if we let ourselves explore it. This might be when getting some help is needed for example from self-help books, from a counsellor or psychologist. Speak to your GP or any health professional and they can help you access this kind of support.

Also, if you are experiencing episodes of binge eating, when you eat a large amount of food in a short space of time and have feelings of being out of control, that you have to eat or that you cannot stop eating, then it would be worth talking to your GP or the health professionals at the obesity service because they can help you access help for binge eating.

Finally, additional support and help might be really beneficial if you find that you want to make changes to your life, say to reduce stress, anxiety, depression or deal with anger differently but you are not sure how to make the changes or the changes just feel too big and difficult to manage on your own, then counselling, self-help or seeing a psychologist could be just what your need. Once again, your GP can help you access this kind of support.