How to Overcome Emotional Eating and Tell the Difference Between Physical and Emotional Hunger

Janet plopped down on the couch after work, exhausted from a day of meetings and everyday demands. She looked around the empty house. Her husband wouldn’t be home for dinner that night due to a meeting and her children had long left the nest. She stepped over to the pantry and pulled out a bag of chips. Repeatedly throughout the night, she made the trip between the couch, pantry, and fridge. A few times, she thought she better stop, but she carried on – unaware that she was emotional eating, oblivious to her feelings of loneliness and boredom.

Mark walked in the door after school, hot in the face from an encounter with a bully. He knew middle school would be hard, but he didn’t know he’d feel so alone or out of place. He opened the fridge door and pulled out the leftover dish of spaghetti. Once it was heated, he sat down at the table and took his first bite, finally feeling a sense of comfort. Days went by and every day, he’d find his comfort after school from the refrigerator.

Dana was ecstatic, she just received a promotion at work, and she couldn’t wait to reward herself with a fancy dessert from the restaurant down the street. Anytime Dana succeeded or did a good job, she’d reward herself with something sweet or a fancy meal. The only way she knew how to celebrate was with food.

All of these individuals are engaged in a form of emotional eating. If you find yourself turning to food when you feel lonely, sad, angry, or even happy, you may be suffering from emotional eating, which means instead of processing the emotion you’re feeling, you’re using food as a coping mechanism or way to soothe or enhance the emotion.

What is Emotional Eating?

Emotional eating can be linked to both positive and negative feelings, and it occurs when we use food to deal with our feelings, whether it’s feelings of happiness and joy, or sadness and disappointment.

Emotional eating can be tied to a major or traumatic event, but it doesn’t have to be. If we lose a loved one, we might engage in a period of binge eating or not eating at all to cope. Typically, however, emotional eating occurs on a daily or consistent basis as our way of dealing with life’s ups and downs.

Emotional Eating Patterns Are Learned

Emotional eating is a learned behavior and it can happen in adulthood and childhood. A child who is rewarded with a pizza party for getting good grades might grow up using food as a reward for accomplishment or feelings of celebration. A child who is constantly given a sweet to stop them from crying might grow up using those sweets as a form of comfort.

This doesn’t mean that if you reward a child with a pizza party or comfort a crying child with a sweet that he or she is going to grow up eating emotionally, but it does mean it’s important to be mindful that emotions aren’t always soothed or celebrated using food.

If food brings you a tremendous amount of joy in your life and you don’t have many other activities that bring you joy, it is easy to see why it can be hard to overcome emotional eating.

Removing the emotional eating would essentially be removing your joy, which is why it’s so important to cultivate other areas of joy in your life apart from food. That might be the joy of joining a Bible study and making new friends or the joy of learning how to knit.

The same thing goes with comfort. If you need a lot of comfort and food is the only source of comfort you have, you can see why it’s difficult to give up overeating or emotional eating.

Understanding the Difference Between Emotional Hunger and Physical Hunger

The first step in overcoming emotional eating is to gain awareness of it. Let’s take a look at the difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger.

Physical hunger:

• Comes on gradually
• Doesn’t cause guilty feelings after eating
• Can be satisfied with a variety of different foods as opposed to one particular craving
• May cause your stomach to grumble, mouth to water, or body to feel weak

Emotional hunger:

• Comes on abruptly
• Causes a craving for a specific type of food such as chocolate cake
• Can lead to binging and an inability to feel the sensation of fullness
• Can result in guilt, shame, or disgust afterward.

When a person feels sad or lonely, he or she may be able to temporarily distract from that emotion by eating. Typically, however, the eating is followed by overwhelming feelings of guilt and shame. Now, instead of focusing on the feelings of sadness and processing the emotions that led to the eating, the individual is distracted by the feeling of guilt and working through that emotion.

An individual might use food to stuff down his or her anger or be entertained. These are emotional forms of hunger. The individual is hungering for relief from the anger and feelings of excitement and fun in the form of entertainment.

To gain awareness of where emotional eating may be happening in your life, pay attention to how you feel before you eat and how you feel after you eat.

Asking yourself the following questions can be a great way to gain awareness around what kind of hunger you’re experiencing:

• What’s going on that’s making me want to eat?
• What emotions am I experiencing?
• Will eating solve this problem?
• Could eating make me feel worse?
• What might God want me to know right now?

Emotional hunger is your need for love, joy, happiness, support, and comfort. When individuals feel a void emotionally in their lives, it’s important to find ways to fill that void apart from food.

The following two Bible verses can be a great comfort when dealing with emotional eating and hunger:

Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh; is anything too difficult for me? – Jeremiah 32: 27

And my God will supply all of your needs according to His riches in glory in Jesus Christ. – Philippians 4:19

Ways to Overcome Emotional Eating

Once you get in the habit of becoming aware of whether you’re feeling physical or emotional hunger before you eat, you must learn how to process your emotions healthily and find tools other than food to support that processing.

Emotional eating is never a reason to beat yourself up. Use it as an opportunity to learn what’s going on inside of you and re-learn some habits. Once you’ve identified that you’re feeling a strong emotion that’s alluring you to reach for food to enhance or ease it, ask yourself what else you could do besides eat?

If you’re really happy and want to celebrate, what other ways could you celebrate? Perhaps by simply thanking God, inviting friends over for a movie, getting your hair done, or taking a trip. Does this mean you can never celebrate with food? Of course not! If you struggle with emotional eating, it’s good to create a list of ways you enjoy celebrating that doesn’t involve food all of the time.

If you’re really sad, how else might you cope with it as you process it? Maybe that looks like spending time reading the Bible, running outside, calling a friend, taking a candlelit bubble bath, journaling, or reading a good book.

For an emotion to be processed, it needs to be named and felt. Then, it’s important to ask yourself what other emotions you’re feeling or what else this emotion is bringing up. Next, it’s a great idea to process it with another person. Maybe that looks like unpacking it with your best friend or your spouse.

If you know you have a hard time processing emotion and use food as a way to cope, we would love to support you. If you know you engage in emotional eating and would like to work with a Christian counselor to overcome it, reach out to us by clicking here.