Emotional Eating

What is emotional eating? Emotional eating is when your relationship with food changes depending on your emotion. For example, this may be food restriction, binge eating or just changing your food choices. Why do we emotionally eat? There are so many reasons why we emotionally eat. One of the reasons could be our genetics. Some people are born with the genes that make you food focused when experiencing stress. but also some people are born with the genes that make you food avoidant when stressed. There's also evolutionary reasons so back when we were cavemen we wouldn't know what our next meal would be so when we would eat we'd store all the food as fat to keep us going for long periods of time. This was extremely helpful back in the cavemen days but a little tricky now for us because the world and our environment has changed. We now have an unlimited amount of food available to us at all times, meaning that our body's ability to store fat for long periods of time is a little bit more problematic. A way in which we might describe our new environment is obesogenic, which basically means that our environment contributes to fat gain. An example of this is the fact that food is basically everywhere. It's in most stores that we walk into and we're able to order food to wherever we are within half an hour. In addition to this, the type of food available is typically high in fat and high in sugar. But also our lifestyles have changed. We're generally less active, we take public transport or drive to places and our job are generally more sedentary. But another example of how our environment encourages emotional eating and promotes fat gain is through supermarkets. So if you picture your local supermarket, typically the first few aisles you walk through will be the fruit and veg aisles and the last one will be the sweets, chocolate and snack vials. So if you think about self-control as a muscle the more you work it the more tired it gets. So you begin your shop and you're sticking to your shopping list but by the end of the store you may be more likely to add in extra things from the snack or the sweet aisles. This is because supermarkets design their stores to play on the fact that your self-control muscle is tired by the end of your shopping trip. They play on this fact and encourage the purchase of energy-dense cheap food. We also may eat because of any one of our emotions. Our relationship with food can change depending on how anxious we are, stress levels, happiness, excitement, feeling sad, angry or feeling shame. This is because we may have made associations between emotion and food during childhood or as an adult. For example, a common association is being given sweets when we've hurt ourselves when we were younger. As an adult we may then form an association between sweets and sadness so that when we feel that emotion our instant reaction is to reach for food to cheer us up. This is completely understandable and many people have formed these kind of associations. So what I really want to emphasize is that our environment, genetics, childhood and evolutionary factors are constantly pushing us to eat. Emotional eating is made up of really complex interactions and it's not purely an issue of willpower.