Emotional Eating - Connection Between Food and Mood

Emotional Eating - Connection Between Food and Mood


Your mental, emotional and physical health are interconnected, so take this knowledge to help you get back in control for optimal health and wellness.

While there is no shortage of diet books and new fitness equipment on the market, the problems of being overweight and obese continue to grow with the number of people being affected by these serious but preventable conditions. There must be something else going on here.

All of us have our own special relationship with food. We don't just use food to satisfy our physical hunger; we sometimes use it to quell our emotional hunger as well.

What is Emotional Eating?

As we learn more and more about why we eat and why we choose the foods we eat, we begin to understand how our emotions play such an instrumental role in our health. Roger Gould, MD, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA and author of Shrink Yourself: Break Free from Emotional Eating Forever, defines emotional eating as eating to satisfy emotional hunger.

In this fashion, you use food for comfort or as a way to cope with life. That means you eat for reasons other than what your body needs. We all indulge in emotional eating at one point or another. Reaching for chocolate after a disagreement with your spouse or comforting yourself after a grueling meeting at work with an entire pizza are prime examples of emotional eating.

But when this condition goes too far, it crosses the line into food addiction, where you actually lose control over what and how you eat.

Why do We do It?

Dr. Gould points out that all of us have emotional hunger. The difference between an emotional eater and a non-emotional eater is how they respond to this hunger. When presented with a challenge, an emotional eater has a knee-jerk reaction to reach for whatever food will offer him or her a moment of comfort.

Our comfort foods are usually not the healthiest choices, including ice cream, refined carbohydrates, heavy pastas and fast food. Emotional eating happens without much regard to health, nutrition or even real hunger. In fact, eating is usually hurried, with very little awareness of what is being consumed and, therefore, emotional eaters are more prone to overeating.

Food offers relief from stress or emotional discomfort and provides a refuge and safety net that we can quickly turn to for solace and security. Food becomes the drug that distracts us from whatever discomfort we are feeling.

The more we emotionally eat, the less likely we are to focus on the real cause of our unrest. But food is just a temporary bandage. The feeling that drove you to emotionally eat in the first place is still there, and will quickly return.

And worst of all, now there are usually new feelings of guilt, remorse, anger and isolation once you realize you've been giving in to emotional eating.