Tame Your Emotional Eating

Food can have crazy powers over us. Sometimes, even the most disciplined find themselves eating a whole bag of chips, just because. Sound familiar? Know this: You’re not alone. That’s why in every issue of 2019 we’ll be tackling a di‚erent eating issue. First up: Emotional eating.

- Karen Robock

We’ve all joyfully gobbled up a thick slice of chocolate birthday cake, picked at finger sandwiches at the funeral of a loved one and clinked champagne glasses to toast the happy couple at a wedding. These are all perfectly normal, healthy ways to engage with food – and they’re also examples of emotional eating. “We all engage in emotional eating to some degree,” says Lorilee Keller, a registered clinical counsellor and eating-disorders therapist with Food for Thought Counselling in Vancouver.

Our emotional associations with food are deeply ingrained and go right back to infancy, says Keller. “It starts with a baby’s need for milk and the connection to safety and comfort that it brings,” she says. From there, our bond with food grows as we use it to celebrate events, connect with others and comfort ourselves, she says. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that. Where we get into trouble, though, is when we use food as a crutch to deal with an emotion that we are uncomfortable with or don’t know how to process.

The experts evaluate emotional eating on a spectrum, with one end being food used for sen sory gratification (like a slice of birthday cake), which is considered a normal part of eating. “The next level would be finding comfort in food, which can be healthy if done without guilt and while being aware of your feelings and hunger cues as you eat,” says Keller. As you move along the spectrum, more disordered eating patterns emerge, where food is used as a distraction from feelings and, in the extreme, binge eating is used as punishment. “Emotional eating isn’t necessarily bad or shameful,” says Rachel Molenda, a holistic nutritionist and emotional eating coach based in Toronto. “But we need to understand why we’re turning to food.”