Defining Emotional Eating

It’s that time of year where everything seems to sort of pile up. School is well into session and things are getting busy with people trying to get work in as holidays quickly approach. This time of year, it’s easy to bury your head. I’ll concede that it’s not only easy but convenient to bury your head this time of year, too. You can bury your body in big, comfy sweaters, or bury your anxieties in your school work or job, or you can bury your emotions in a variety of things. One of the most prominent things that people choose to drown their emotions in is food.

Before we get into any sort of conversation about emotional eating, we must first define it. Emotional eating is using food to deal with emotions or feelings instead of using it to satisfy one’s hunger. It’s a highly nuanced concept, as simple and straightforward as it may seem. Most people engage in emotional eating from time to time, and, in fact, it can be quite a normal behavior. However, at some point, it becomes problematic. This is what I’d like to investigate today: where does one draw the line between normal emotionally-driven eating and disordered emotional eating? How do food and emotions interlock? Why do we emotionally eat, and why do we care?

Let’s begin by visualizing instances of normal emotionally-driven eating. We have all seen quite a few in today’s media. The most common example is, after a breakup, a female will often resort to food, like ice cream, in order to console herself. We’ve also seen people eat more when they’re happy, as a form of celebration. In these examples, food is used as a tool to better one’s state of being, which is just what emotional eating is. These examples are generally seen as socially acceptable, especially eating while happy or excited. It was previously believed that emotional eating was solely used for coping with negative emotions, but a study published by Peggy Bongers and Anita Jansen details how emotional eating is a term that can also be used to describe eating in response to positive emotions. You may wonder how much of your eating fits into the category of emotional eating, if this is the case, and, in turn, you may begin to worry that you are an emotional eater. Here’s the deal, though: we’re all emotional eaters. Food is an integral part of human nature. We live and breathe because of food, and we can’t survive without it. Therefore, it’s heavily incorporated into the way that we interact with the world around us.

We eat cake on our birthdays, we go out to nice dinners and order expensive meals on our anniversaries and to celebrate graduations and new jobs. We get our favorite foods on Superbowl Sunday and we have holidays that revolve solely around candy and home-cooking. Food is a great way to express culture and even love. All of these examples are not examples of emotional eating, but rather, examples of the ways in which food and emotion are connected. In this, emotionally-driven eating is normal, because we are animals that survive off of food intake, and we are also animals that possess emotions, so there’s no wonder that these two key parts of our lives interact.

Another great thing that food does is it makes us feel good. I, of course, say this with some hesitation, as we’ve all had negative interactions with food and emotion, whether that be guilt over eating a little too much or anything else. However, although I’m no neuroscientist, I do know that there are pleasure centers in our brain that light right up when we eat something that tastes good. Food has this wonderful ability to make us feel good in a way that nothing else can. How perfect is it, then, that our body has these pleasure receptors, and that our bodies need food to survive! One could presume that our bodies have wired themselves this way in order to promote survival. It’s similar to the way that sexual arousal and stimulation cause pleasure-- our bodies want us to reproduce, and so why not make that feel good to promote it a little more? Our bodies want us to survive via nutrition, so why not make eating a pleasurable experience?

In this, emotional eating makes sense. When we’ve had a bad day, it makes sense to self-soothe by engaging those pleasure centers in your brain. So, why is emotional eating sometimes problematic? Because, at times, we can become dependent on food to make us feel better. It’s dangerous to toe this line because, as I said, food has an ability to make us feel a way that nothing else can. This sensation of consuming something and going through the manual motions of digestion can make one feel fulfilled in places in which life fails to do so. So, while it’s normal to dance with food and emotion in small doses, it’s also easy to become reliant upon and attached to food to make us feel better in a way that we can’t easily replace with other coping mechanisms.

One thing I’d like to clarify, though, is the concept of “food addiction.” I put this term in quotation marks because I do not believe that it is a concept which exists. For one, you can’t be addicted to something you need to survive. If this were the case, we would be addicted to air and water. You can be addicted to drugs, alcohol, and sex, among many other things. This is convenient, because you can remove drugs, alcohol, and sex from one’s life. However, you cannot remove food. If food addiction was real, then how would one recover? They would not be able to. You can’t be a recovering alcoholic who still drinks one beer a day. A recovering food addict would either starve or fail at recovery. It’s a problematic concept, and I’d like to state that emotional eating and food addiction are not the same, because food addiction is not possible.

So why do we care about emotional eating? Can’t we just stop, if addiction is not a problem? Well, no. Addiction may not be a problem, but reliance is. When one has turned to food repeatedly in order to soothe themselves and they can’t find anything else to help themselves, they will find that food cannot fulfill every need that they have. When you’ve had a bad day and need a little pick-me-up, food can do the trick. But when you’re in a fight with your significant other and decide to eat instead of engaging with them, food can’t fix your relationship. When you have a project due tomorrow that you’ve not begun and you decide to eat instead of work, food can’t do your project for you. Emotional eating becomes problematic when you set unrealistic expectations as for what food can really do for you. Unfortunately, food has its limits, and while it can make you feel better temporarily, which may be all that you need at times, it can’t cure depression or anxiety and certainly can’t solve any problems for you, unless your problem is that you’re hungry and need nourishment!

Emotional eating is not easy to navigate, especially if you’re worried about whether or not you are reliant on food. It’s easy to wonder what to do at the point where you realize you are reliant on food to get through tough times, and the answer isn’t one that’s easy to hear. If you are worried that you are dependent on food, you have to turn to other things, and you have to deal with just not being as satisfied as you could be. It’s not a good feeling, but it’s more gratifying than feeling trapped by food, as emotional eating can make you feel. Food is a part of life, and should not be put away or ignored. We need food to survive, and we should embrace it. At the same time, though, we need to respect its limits, as well as our own. Food can only do so much, but we can always do more.