Emotional Eating

I’m in a bad place right now.

I ate horribly all weekend, I ate a lot right before bed on Saturday and Sunday, I ate junk food which I NEVER do, and I had almost no salad. This morning I was too afraid of the scale to weigh myself, I was looking at pictures of me in which look terrible, I have a ton of work staring me in the face, and I finished it off with spilt coffee all over some tax returns. I’m stressed about cleaning my house tonight for the maid tomorrow and I have a marathon on Sunday I feel under prepared for. My house needs work, my laundry and dry cleaning need done, and all I want to do…

..is eat. I just ate breakfast, but I want more. Maybe a cookie – even some carrots or yogurt or a (new) cup of coffee.  Pretzles maybe.  Just a few?

This is emotional eating, and I’m feeling it right now. It is so intense even as I write this entry, knowing better, I’m evaluating.  Maybe I am hungry…

I think emotional eating is a huge and complex machine, fueled in large part by the unrestrained Western diet and the ubiquitous attitude towards food as prescription free Prozac. Think you are immune from emotional eating? How common is it to see women in the media, crying in their pajamas over a container of ice cream, or to see food as a reward for a good day at work, or even now to see Lance Armstrong promoting light beer, ostensibly because he worked his ass off earlier in the day on the bike. Emotional eating is bad for your body and your psyche and if you suffer from emotional eating, it is so powerful you may feel you can never escape it. If you feel this way I suggest a book that was recommenced to me called “Shrink Yourself’ by Roger Gould.

Dr. Gould discusses the causes, effects and beginning cures of emotional eating. I used to think I didn’t eat emotionally, but I found through my reading that I do it all the time. I will eat I’m bored, when I get home from work I’ll binge because I’ve starved myself all day and the last thing I want to do is the laundry or the dishes. More often than not though, when I eat emotionally it comes in this form:

“I was ‘good’ all day, I ran 7 miles, and nothing I’m eating is ‘bad’, so I’m going to go ahead and have as much of it as I want, even though I’m not hungry.”


“I did a hard Pilates class today so I can have Chinese food.”

“I went for a 5 hour bike ride today so I can eat more than two servings of peanut butter with my carrots; hey it even has protein in it!”

When I read this in Dr Gould’s book, I felt like he was talking to me: “in order to compensate for eating excess, you have to exercise to much...Any time you need to stop exercising ... your weight balloons up quickly. I’ve seen patients ...who put on substantial weight after injuries and then couldn’t lose it, though they had been trim athletes at one time - albeit athletes with food addiction.” “To lose weight for life you need to conquer food addiction, not merely run around it” p162.

What Gould doesn’t talk about, which I believe is entirely relevant, is how weight can balloon much faster if the food you turn to is loaded with the addicting quality (literally addicting - rats will work as hard for junk food as they will for heroine) of sugar, fat, and salt that Kessler talks about in “The End of Overeating”. Kessler also talks about using food to self medicate as reinforcing in a physical way the reaction to emotional eating. “Because a cookie makes me feel better, its easy to develop the habit of seeking it out when I’m sad or angry. Over time, as neural pathways link the change in my mood with the experience of eating the cookie, the association grows stronger.”p150. He continues “when emotions amplify reward, the drive for reward becomes even harder to control.”

I’m not saying junk food has no place (ok, maybe I am) but I am saying using food as a reward for working out or to help you ease your tears after a break up probably isn’t helping you lose weight and definitely isn’t helping you face the emotions that are driving this eating in the first place. The problem is further compounded because using food during emotional times has a very real effect on your physical reaction to dealing with unpleasant situations.

Emotional eating in a culture where avoiding problems with sugar and fat is encouraged and cheap addicting food is almost totally unrestricted. What a mess!

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Next time on Popular Excuses; Michelle Obama’s Fight against Childhood Obesity - Yes its Necessary (especially at 50% amongst minority children)
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Reading List:
Roger Gould “Shrink Yourself”
David Kessler “The End of Overeating”