Did you know that there are different types of emotional eating?
Most people think of emotional eating as eating away your sad, negative emotions. We see movies where the couple breaks up and the next scene shows the actress crying, laying in bed, watching old movies and eating a box of chocolates.
But sadness isn’t the only reason we emotionally eat.
A lot of us don’t even realize we’re emotional eaters.
In fact, it wasn’t until I began following a food protocol that I realized I was an emotional eater. I realized that I ate to avoid emotions like boredom, confusion, overwhelm, and joy….WHHAAT?
Emotional eating is just eating to avoid emotion. Surprisingly, we don’t only want to dull negative emotions. We eat to dull any emotion that we don’t feel comfortable with…..
So here are the 3 different types of emotional eating:
1. Eating to avoid “negative” emotions.
This is similar to that first case scenario I gave you. When we eat because we feel sadness, loneliness, shame, hurt, boredom, heartbreak….just to name a few. I think you get the point.
We eat because we want to make ourselves feel better. We think that an ice cream will relieve the negative emotion and cheer us up. Unfortunately, that “cheer up” only lasts momentarily. What happens when we eat to avoid negative emotions is that we end up creating even more of them. After the ice cream, you’re still left with the hurt, but now there’s guilt and bloating on top of it. Overeating to avoid negative emotions creates more negative emotions that can spiral, causing even more desire to buffer all of that negativity.
2. Eating to avoid “indulgent” emotions.
Indulgent emotions are things like self-doubt, worry, confusion, overwhelm, and victimization. They are the emotions that prevent us from moving forward and taking action. Most of the thoughts that cause these emotions are “dream excuses” that hold us back from living up to our true potential.
Are you ever at work and get a flood of emails that come in with all kinds of to-dos? Instead of getting to work, you make your way to the break room, which is filled with sweet treats. This is an example of buffering indulgent emotions. They feel uncomfortable and we want to avoid them so we go to food. Unfortunately, like all overeating. The food doesn’t solve the overwhelm. It will probably do nothing but add more overwhelm because now you’ve got the stress of your job AND the extra weight to deal with.
3. Eating to dull “positive” emotions.
This is the type of emotional eating that most of us don’t think about. It’s when we eat to dull our positive feelings. Many of us actually feel a little uncomfortable feeling the “high” we get from certain positive emotions, and we’ll bring ourselves back down with food.
Sounds kind of crazy, right? But let me ask you this…have you ever gotten into a new great relationship, having the time of your life, and then realize 6 months into it that you’ve put on a good 10 pounds? Or maybe you got a big job promotion and the first thing you want to do is celebrate with food and drinks!
You’ll know you’re attempting to dull your positive emotions when you say things like “I deserve it.” Think about how you feel after you’ve overcome a hard day and say “I deserve it.” Sure, you get a little relief in the moment but ultimately, you end up feeling much worse. Is that really giving yourself what you deserve? I don’t think so!
In order to overcome positive emotional eating, we must learn how to appreciate and reward ourselves without food and/or alcohol. After all, these are pretty crappy rewards.
So as you can see, no matter what type of emotional eater you tend to be, they all result in a long-term negative effect in our lives.
Food doesn’t fix emotions, so it just doesn’t work.
So how do we stop?
We have to learn how to feel.
The only reason we eat is to avoid feeling—whether it’s positive or negative.
So we have to open our capacity to feel bad, open our capacity to feel uncomfortable, and even open our capacity to feel good.
This is how you stop overeating. It takes commitment and conscious awareness.
There is no emotion we can’t handle. Think about it. Emotion is just energy in motion. It’s a vibration in our body. We tend to be super scared of emotion and want to run away from it, but as human’s, we’re supposed to feel.
We are meant to feel it all…the good, the bad, and the ugly! So the better we get at doing that, the richer our lives will be overall!
In health & happiness,
Jamie
