Emotional Eating: 9 Powerful Ways To Deal With Your Emotions Without Eating

Permanent Weight Loss: Dr. Barbara L Katz

Are you like many of us and overeat to avoid feeling uncomfortable emotions? Uncomfortable emotions include sadness, boredom, anger, loneliness, anxiety, stress, and overwhelm. Comfort foods – foods that are high in sugar, fat, or carbohydrates – are typically the foods we eat when we want to feel better. 

These foods increase the dopamine level (the “feel good hormone”) in our brains and temporarily improve our moods. It’s normal to have particular comfort foods you like to eat. Mine are dark chocolate and Tillamook Oregon Dark Cherry Ice Cream.

“Comfort foods – foods that are high in sugar, fat, or carbohydrates – are typically the foods we eat when we want to feel better.“

These sweet foods help me feel better for a short while. While sweets (or other favorite foods) may temporarily improve our moods, we gain excess weight if we eat frequently for comfort rather than hunger. Overeating may also cause us to feel unhappy or ashamed the next day due to our lack of control.

Occasional Emotional Eating:

Occasional emotional eating does not cause permanent weight gain; however, frequent emotional eating is often a major cause of our weighing more than is healthy for our bodies. Rather than dieting, learning to deal with our emotions without eating to suppress them is the key to permanent weight loss.

Here Are Some Suggestions For Lessening Emotional Eating:

1.  Be Brave Enough:

Decide that you’re going to be brave enough to feel all your uncomfortable emotions. When you’re not afraid to experience those emotions, you become stronger, more self-confident, and more resilient. While feeling uncomfortable emotions is never pleasant, once you’re willing to feel all your feelings, you’ll eliminate the need to use food (or other buffers such as alcohol or frequent shopping) to keep from feeling them.

2. Uncomfortable Emotions:

Decide ahead of time what you will do instead of eating when you are experiencing uncomfortable emotions. 

Nine ways to deal with your uncomfortable emotions:

1. Sit and experience the uncomfortable feeling until it becomes less intense.
2. Journal about the emotion as you’re feeling it.
3. Take deep, slow breaths until you feel better.
4. Do some physical exercise.
5. Talk to a close friend, a coach, or a therapist.
6. Listen to music.
7. Meditate or do some other form of relaxation.
8. Go outside and enjoy nature.
9. Spend time with your pet.

“Most emotions become less intense after less than five minutes.”

How Different Emotions Feel In Your Body:

As you feel your emotions, notice where you feel them most intensely in your body. Also, notice if your feelings have a color, shape, or texture. Lastly, pay attention to how long you feel uncomfortable. Most emotions become less intense after less than five minutes.

Become familiar with how different emotions feel in your body. Once you’re familiar with them, you can practice feeling your most common uncomfortable emotions and see if you can change how they feel. Can you make them feel less intense or stronger?

Bene’ Brown wrote the book “Atlas of the Heart,” which describes and explores many of our most common emotions. If you have difficulty naming or recognizing what emotions you are feeling, I recommend this book.

When you become aware of your emotions and what they feel like in your body, you become less afraid to feel them. When you’re willing to feel all your emotions, you’ll be a more vulnerable – but a more genuine – version of yourself. Your confidence will increase, and you’ll be more likely to take risks and fully embrace your life.

Decrease Your Emotional Eating:

To decrease your emotional eating, it is also helpful to work on changing your mindset around food and why you eat certain foods. Instead of wanting to eat something sweet to feel better, can you learn to think of sweets only as pleasurable treats – without needing to use them to elevate your mood? Also, think about how you’ll feel worse about yourself tomorrow if you eat emotionally today. 

When you pay attention to your emotions and learn to feel them instead of eating to numb them, and when you become willing to experience your feelings, your need to eat emotionally will decrease, and it will be easier to reach and stay at your natural weight.

Excellent Goal To Decrease Your Emotional Eating:

While it’s an excellent goal to decrease your emotional eating, it’s also important to have compassion for yourself and remind yourself that no one is perfect. Remember, it’s normal for all of us to sometimes emotionally eat. The goal is to learn how to handle our emotions most of the time without using food to avoid feeling them.

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