Are you eating your emotions?

Do you eat because you are hungry or because you are bored, sad or simply deserve a reward for a tough day? Everyone has a different relationship with food and as it is eating disorder week, I wanted to give some needed attention to Emotional Eating Behaviour.

To set the record straight now, emotion eating is not classified as an eating disorder, it is a behaviour, but equally important to identify and deal with where necessary.

What is emotional eating?

Here at PurePurpose™, we are fully aware that we don’t always eat just to satisfy physical hunger. Many of us also turn to food for comfort, stress relief, or evenly loneliness – sound familiar?

Emotional eating is using food to make yourself feel better—to fill emotional needs, rather than your stomach. If we grabbed an apple or made a salad this wouldn’t have such a damaging effect on our health, but unfortunately, we tend to crave sugar, salt, and fat in the foods/ snacks we chose such as, crisps, pizza, chocolate, ice cream to fill our emotional void.

Emotional eating doesn’t fix your emotional problem(s), in fact, it usually makes you feel worse. Not only does the original emotional issue(s) remain, but you also feel guilty for overeating. Do you?

Take a moment to check in with yourself. If you answer yes to some of the questions below, then it is worth considering some support to help you work through and develop a different behaviour to your feelings than eating.

· Do you eat more when you're

feeling stressed?

· Do you eat when you're not hungry

or when you're full?

· Do you eat to feel better (feeling,

sad, angry, bored, lonely, anxious,

etc.)?

· Do you reward yourself with food?

· Do you feel like food is a friend?

· Do you feel powerless or out of control around food?

· Do you eat due to social influences/pressures for example from friend/peer

pressure?

· Do you eat due to family/cultural expectations, childhood upbringing?

A few hard but necessary facts.

Although maybe difficult to read, it is necessary to present a few facts about emotional eating.

· Emotional hunger can’t be filled with food.

· Eating may feel great and the best choice in the moment, but the feelings that

triggered the eating haven’t gone away.

· Because of the type of food chosen and the number of calories consumed, you

often feel worse than you did before eating.

· You punish yourself, feel guilty or even out of control.

When you are hungry is it physical (real) or emotional hunger?

Here is another check in moment for you. Take a look at the bullets below, you may recognise some emotional eating patterns yourself:

· Emotional hunger comes on suddenly, you crave something immediately.

· Emotional hunger craves specific foods generally junk foods giving an instant

energy rush.

· Emotional hunger often leads to mindless eating – resulting in eating way

more than you intended.

· Emotional hunger isn’t satisfied once you’re full because the emotion hasn’t

gone anywhere – all that you feel is bloated or maybe even sick because you

suddenly feel you have overeaten.

Recognise anything here?

Let's Summarise.

Occasionally using food as a reward or to celebrate something can be seen as a normal pleasure in life. However, when food is the first thing you think of when stressed, upset, angry, lonely, exhausted, or bored then the real feeling or problem is never being addressed just temporarily quietened with the intake of food.

On top of this, your weight starts to increase, self-confidence may become an issue, relationships effected at home and in the workplace. You begin to feel increasingly powerless over your feelings and use food to repress them temporarily.

Time to take back your control.

If you have read anything in this article that hits home or can relate to any of the check-in questions or statements, then there is a chance that you are struggling to some degree with emotional eating behaviour.

The good news is there is no need to feel powerless or out of control. There are proven techniques to deal with and overcome emotional eating behaviour and make positive change in your life.

Here at PurePurpose™ we are trained and qualified in the use of, in Dutch the NVE - Nederlandse vragenlijst voor eetgedrag or in English the DEBQ – Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire and a qualified member of the BGN.

By using a systematic, non-bias and proven psychological approach we can identify your emotional eating style and understand the reasoning behind your weight gain. Together with you PurePurpose™ will create your specific coaching and support plan to enable you to avoid triggers, eliminate cravings and put a stop to your emotional eating behaviour.