How to Identify and Overcome Emotional Eating Triggers

Breaking the connection between emotions and eating

We have all experienced it: You have a particularly stressful day and are agitated and edgy. Within a short time, you’ve decimated all of the tasty food in your refrigerator or pantry, even though you weren’t hungry. 

What happened here? In contrast to physiological hunger, emotional eating is defined as eating in response to an emotional reaction. This doesn’t mean you are "weak," so please don’t blame yourself. 

There are specific mechanisms driving this problem. Let’s look at the recipe for this disaster and learn how to break the cycle. 

What Are Emotions?

Emotions are the feelings we experience, usually in response to events of some type. There are many different emotions, and they help us to communicate with others. 

It’s important to acknowledge emotions and try to identify what triggered them. It’s also useful to look for physical cues that alert you that you may be getting more emotional than you realize. 

What Feeds the Emotional Eating Cycle?

The behavior pattern of emotional eating, which can result in weight gain and metabolic imbalance, could sabotage your carefully planned nutritional program. 

• Snacking can be driven by simple boredom. If you find you want a snack, consider if you’re restless or bored. If so, do something else instead, and you’ll be addressing the cause of the snacking impulse.
• Cravings for a particular food can be driven by emotions as well. It may be that somewhere in your past, a connection was made between a state of anxiety and this particular food item. 
• Stress eating can also be considered a form of self-soothing, which is a stress response. If you can identify the stress and address it, you can treat the underlying cause. Talk to your coach about this possibility. 

Emotional Eating Versus Physiologic Hunger

Physiologic hunger results when your body sends signals to your brain to indicate that fuel reserves are low and it’s time to eat. These are triggered by several hormonal triggers, including the hormone ghrelin. 

Physiologic hunger does not cause your brain to become unstable, your mood to become irritable, or your stress level to increase. If you become angry or irritable when hungry, it indicates that your blood sugar may be unstable. 

This will stabilize as you work to eliminate sweets and carbohydrates from your diet because a low-carb diet stabilizes blood sugar. 

Strategies to Break the Cycle

Identify the stressor or the trigger

Taking the time to identify what exactly is triggering the emotional eating behavior is important. Is there something in your life that you’re not dealing with? Is there a big step you need to take, but it’s scary or intimidating, and you’re procrastinating? 

Are there people in your life who constantly “push your buttons” but you haven’t asked them not to, or haven’t worked on stabilizing that aspect of yourself? This can be a big issue in itself, but let’s just say that addressing the behavioral trigger can be key to halting it. 

Coping strategies for stress

When you see yourself going down that rabbit hole of stressful thinking, focus on the thoughts and images your mind is creating. Are you reliving a stressful experience repeatedly? Is your mind creating multiple disaster scenarios over and over again? 

Short-circuit these harmful perseverations by making a plan and writing it down. What happened, or what are you worried about? What could you have done differently, or what could you do in the future? Create a plan, then put it aside and allow yourself to focus on something else, knowing you’ve done all you can. 

Disconnect Emotions From Eating

Emotional eating is a harmful pattern that can ruin your health and cause food addictions. By recognizing triggers and dealing with them through non-food interventions, you can learn to keep emotions separate from your eating. 

Consuming a low-carbohydrate diet will help you stop overeating emotionally by only eating satiating, healthy foods as your body requires them. Plan ahead and take that emotional eating monster by the horns so that you can decide what to eat and when. This one action will improve your future health outcomes.     

‍