Understanding Emotional Eating

How often do you pay attention to your eating? For some people, our food is something that we really focus on. But for other people, food is simply a means to an end. No matter how you look at it, food is a really important aspect to our lives. It’s how we fuel our body and our mind. The quality of food that we eat has an impact on how we feel as well as how much food we eat.

Food is also something that’s become steeped in our culture. Just about every holiday season has specific foods that go with it: Halloween has candies, Thanksgiving has turkey, and birthdays have cake. When you think about it, holidays aren’t just about the actions that we go through, like putting the cookies out for Santa. Holidays are really about connecting with other people. So when we spend these holidays with our friends and family, these foods become connected with all of these memories with people that we love and care about. That’s partly why a lot of foods are called comfort foods - because we associate those foods with feelings of comfort, safety, or love. It’s about the emotions that have become somehow associated with those foods.

Granted, not everyone has fond memories of the holidays, or of friends and family. In times like this, food could become associated with feelings of stress or anxiety. Since those could be some of the memories or feelings associated with the foods that are eaten around the holidays.

But our brains form associations between the world around us and our emotions. Because food is a necessity for us to survive, we frequently end up forming associations between food and the emotions that we feel.   This has a huge impact on why we emotionally eat.  

If I’m feeling stressed, and my brain has associated mashed potatoes and gravy with comfort or safety, then I’m going to be inclined to eat those foods when I’m feeling stressed - especially if I’m not aware that this is happening or if I feel like I don’t have other ways to handle my emotions.

Understanding emotional eating is the first step to changing your relationship with food and altering how you look at food’s role in your life.