What We're Really Hungry for When We Eat Emotionally

We all just want to feel okay

This post is from my book Hungry: Trust Your Body and Free Your Mind around Food. 

I polled several clients and asked when they first heard the term emotional eating. I discovered that they heard it either from a Weight Watchers leader or, like me, they couldn’t remember. It was just a term they knew that helped them understand why they were overeating.

I saw a chart, maybe a therapist showed me, or I had read it in a weight loss book, that claimed we want to eat crunchy and salty foods when we are angry and warm and sweet foods when we are sad. When I was trying to understand my own episodes of overeating, this chart seemed to help. It linked trail mix to stress, cheese and crackers to anger, and ice cream to sadness. I now had a tool I could use to dissect my overeating behavior and inform me how I was feeling. Accurate or not.

If my emotions were causing my overeating, I now had something else to blame. It wasn’t just the temptation of food, it was how I felt. By far, this was an even bigger and more serious personal attack.

Foods Makes Us Feel Better

When we eat a sugary food, like a pastry or a cookie, our brain releases dopamine. Dopamine is the “feel-good hormone” that can improve our mood, make us feel better, and increase our motivation. We can physically alter how we feel, from sad to happy, with one bite of cake, spoon of ice cream, or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

I shared with you the first binge I had when I was a preteen. As I’ve reflected back on what drove me to eat so much food, I realized it was simple. I wanted to feel better. Over time, as I repeatedly overate, I formed a pattern in my mind. If I didn’t like the way I felt, food, especially salty and sugary treats, could change that. I even found myself eating if I anticipated feeling uncomfortable, like if I knew I had a big project at work due the next morning and needed to stay up late finishing it. The anticipation of stress and overwhelm was enough to drive me to the food pantry.

We’ve been told our emotions are the reason we’ve been overeating and why we choose the foods we do. However, that’s simply not true.

Not Okay to Feel

We live in a culture where it’s not okay to express our emotions. Our culture tells us it’s a sign of weakness if boys cry and a sign of volatility if girls get angry. Growing up, our elders may have showed us how to express how they felt by not expressing emotion at all. Chances are, they said, “I’m fine,” got quiet, or tried to hide how they really felt. Vulnerability around expressing emotions hasn’t been modeled for us, but instead, we’ve been shown how to keep our emotions under control and pretend everything is okay.

And they told us:

“You need to calm down.”

“Stop crying.”

“Go to bed and you’ll feel better.”

“I’ll talk to you when you’ve stopped crying.”

As a result, we also ignore how we feel.

A pivotal time for me on my healing journey was fully feeling my emotions. Instead of pretending I was okay, situations would arise where I was furious, or filled with jealousy or anger — all feelings I thought were inappropriate for me to feel. I didn’t want to admit to anyone that I was petty, reactive, or insecure. But I was, and when I let the feelings come up and fully felt them, it was uncomfortable. I would feel the heat, I would scream, or I would cry. At times, I would feel a sharp pain in my chest.

I never ate while feeling my emotions. Instead, I ate to avoid them.

When we are on the verge of something uncomfortable, eating can soothe us and distract us from feeling.

What Are Emotions?

Emotions are just an energy that wants to move. They’re the most beautiful form of expression we have. They show us how we are living in this world and experiencing it.

Like our two-year-old who demands our attention when we are on the phone, our emotions simply want to be recognized. They want us to look them in the eye and fully be with them. We’ve been brushing them aside or running away from them as fast as we can, but really, our feelings just want us to stop and let them surface.

Blaming Our Circumstances

In our minds, our feelings have been the reason for our overeating. If we weren’t so stressed, we wouldn’t be stress eating. By blaming our feelings for overeating, we have another way of blaming ourselves for our eating behavior. By doing this, we may believe our circumstances are to blame for our overeating. If work wasn’t so stressful, we wouldn’t be stress eating. If we weren’t in the middle of a divorce, we wouldn’t feel so scared. If a loved one didn’t just pass, we wouldn’t be so incredibly sad.

When one of my clients, Jen, heard about emotional eating from her Weight Watchers leader, she felt the relief of understanding why she couldn’t eat just one piece of cake but had four instead. Emotional eating explained her overeating problem, yet it didn’t stop her from overeating. As a single mom to three young children, her life with an overwhelming house during the week and an empty and lonely one every other weekend felt like an emotional roller coaster. Jen didn’t feel safe to fully feel her sadness, and overeating was able to soothe her immediately. But after she binged, Jen felt ashamed and hopeless.

Overeating distracts us when we start feeling uncomfortable and don’t want to feel. However, the aftermath of a binge is even more impactful and painful than the feeling we initially may have been avoiding. Wanting to hide when we overeat erodes our confidence. We feel far worse after a binge than we did before. Why? Because we have an achy belly overfilled with food. We may worry we will gain weight. We tell ourselves we are disgusting and out of control. Because of our definition of emotional eating, the only thing we can blame for this behavior is ourselves and how we feel.

Feelings are our savior. 

They are an energy that wants to move through us. Getting to know them and being with them is simply getting to know ourselves. Feelings are an expression of ourselves. Feeling our feelings takes courage, as doing so sends a deliberate message to ourselves that we are okay. We are okay to be sad, and therefore we will feel sad. We are okay to be angry, and therefore we will be angry. 

Feeling isn’t just about the emotion as much as it is about being okay with ourselves. And being okay with ourselves includes learning to appreciate and respect our bodies.