Emotional eating it’s the act of finding joy in eating healthy right?
For some the thought of eating even a single a vegetable or lettuce leaf is depressing. Well you’ve been rewarded or you’ve rewarded yourself all of your life with junk food to bring you happiness so why would healthy food bring you joy. That’s just not a habit you have created.
Now the real definition
Emotional eating – the act of using food to make yourself feel better. To fill an emotional need rather than fill your stomach. The problem is that after a lifetime of positive rewards with high sugar high fat foods, this is what you turn to to try and find a little bit of happiness. Many of us are in the habit of turning to food for comfort, stress relief, or to reward ourselves rather than hunger.
Emotional eating is so powerful that you may not even realise that you are doing it until after the fact. Then the guilt sinks in and you feel full of regret and the cycle starts all over again.
When you are truly hungry you will easily be able to eat healthier food choices but when you are emotionally eating your body craves very specific foods. These are the foods that have given you a dopamine hit in the past. I use the word hit because it is just like a drug.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a neurotransmitter is like a chemical courier delivering packages to every cell in your body via the nervous system. Dopamine influences your mood and feelings of reward AND motivation.
Eating a diet high in sugar has a huge impact here because sugar attaches to the dopamine receptors making it addictive and this is why it is so difficult to eliminate from your diet. Eating this way over a long period of time causes issues with insulin which is a hormone that is needed to pack sugar into the cell to use for energy but the tissues which need to glucose stop listening to Insulin. Insulin is also a fat horder so the more sugar you eat the less chances you have of losing fat from you body.
The dopamine reward system in our body is an ancient system that was used to help us find important things like food and water and give us the drive to go back for more to nourish our bodies. The dopamine hit you get also helps you focus on the tasks needed to be completed which is also very rewarding. However it is also the same as the hit we get from cocaine, nicotine and heroin as these also give you a huge boost in dopamine. The reward you get from a dopamine hit keeps you going back for more and when you stop, you lower your dopamine and you begin to lose pleasure in life which can be misinterpreted as depression and it is this joyless state that makes you go back for more.
You say you’ve tried everything and nothing has worked. What exactly have you tried. Do you really think you can change a lifetime of a bad relationship with food with just a meal plan and will powder alone? These habits are engrained into your brain. It’s going to take a lot more than just that to shift them.
To move away from emotional eating you need to change the way you get your hit and your relationship and mindset about food and nutrition. You can stay on your healthy eating plan until your emotions start to get the better of you and then you crash and the only way to work through your emotions seems to be food. If emotional eating is causing issues in your life, but you can’t seem to stop doing it, there may be an answer through journaling.
Emotional eating journals help you by reducing the amount you are eating during that moment. They also help you write down your thoughts, which means you can get to the root of the problem. This allows you to find out what is triggering you and why you are being triggered to eat instead of other emotional responses. Working through these emotions is a major component that I use with my patients.
