The holiday season is just now over, and I found myself so isolated from “normal life” for the last month that for once during the holidays, I didn’t really witness any unhealthy eating the whole time and certainly not the obsessive junk food fest that many people celebrate the whole Christmas season with no regard for their health or emotional well-being. Funny how I didn’t miss that one bit!

I’ve been thinking about this notion of emotional eating lately a lot because it affects so many of my clients and those I’ve advised about healthful eating on message boards in the past few years. And I once was an emotional eater as well, so I recognize the symptoms when I see them because I remember how food was once a huge aspect of my life in a highly unhealthful way.

Have a bad day? I’d have to combat all the bad feelings with some Haagen Dazs or a pastry. Stressed at work? Time for a trip to my favorite restaurant to indulge in some very unhealthy white pasta covered with cheese. Lonely? Feeling empty inside? I remember thinking I’d better fill that void with food.

And for what? So that I could avoid something more terrifying, I guess, than anything else I was going through — my own thoughts.

Why our thoughts often frighten us into eating

If you have ever eaten due to stress, perhaps some of what I wrote above resonates with you. I know that it was fear of actually having to face my own feelings that often kept me putting excess food into my mouth for the time in my life when I dealt with emotional eating, and once I recognized that, I was personally able to curb the habit entirely. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t fast, but it did happen.

But just what is it about our own thoughts that scares us so intensely?

Is it that if we actually consider what is on our minds, we feel we might be completely overwhelmed and incapable of functioning? I know that that’s how I sometimes used to feel. In truth, we are all much stronger than we think, and even if getting to the bottom of things means some tears (or even weeks or months of struggle as we grapple with these underlying feelings wrapped up in layer upon layer of protection), it’s worth it if you can undo this destructive tendency to eat to mask how you really feel. The feelings are not worth making yourself ill or overweight with food no matter how powerful they might be.

One book I wish I’d known about when I was dealing with my own emotional eating is Byron Katie’s Loving What Is — which helps you examine the feelings you have toward others and learn how to get to the root of the frustrations once and for all.

A very simple method that worked for me as I personally began working through my own emotional eating was asking myself a simple question: Am I hungry, or am I unhappy? (Naturally, if you eat out of boredom, change “unhappy” to “bored,” and so forth.) Making that question a habit might help you get a handle on the whys behind your own emotional eating.

If you’re not sure of the cause — and sometimes it might be that we don’t even know what beliefs underlie our feelings that are actually incorrect or hurtful to ourselves, and it’s hard to get started — I still believe in starting somewhere. Wherever you can find some sense of what’s going on inside your head, whether it’s an issue related to  parent or how you regard yourself or anything else, taking even one very small step toward getting to the bottom of it will lead to bigger changes in the long haul. The sooner you can start stripping away at the layers of self-protection to get to the heart of the matter, the better.

Food as a replacement for self-care

There’s another reason why some of us focus so heavily on food as a solution for our emotions rather than just our nutritional needs, and this one in particular is something I find to be true more for women than men: we only very rarely take time to take care of ourselves because our lives as women, mothers, spouses/life partners, employees, business women are focused so greatly on giving to others that we almost never give back to ourselves with what we really need — time spent doing things to nurture our souls — so instead of doing that, we eat, thinking crazy thoughts like “Well, at least I can eat something that makes me feel good if I don’t have time to feel good.”

It’s really the same excuse people make for not eating healthfully to begin with — “because life gets in the way,” “because I’d miss <Food X> too much,” and so forth.

And let me tell you — no matter how normal this justification sounds to you (because I know how common it is! but just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s actually right!) — that that is not conducive to a life lived in balance in which we feel calm, confident, happy and as if our main needs are being met on a regular basis (not “indulged,” not necessarily all the time, but regularly enough for us not to feel completely needy and strung out all the time because we have no means of processing the stresses in our lives).

It is NOT healthy to eat to indulge ourselves.

That might not make me very popular to some of you reading this. I get that totally, and I apologize if my words upset you because you feel they hit you below the belt.

But there is never a reason to eat junk just so that we can feel better.

I’ve done this myself (eaten junk to “cure myself” of what ailed me) so many times in my lifetime that I want to say that I am saying this without judging because I know it is very, very hard when you are trapped in that emotional eating cycle to even consider that there can be a calm way of eating without emotions packed into every bite.

But that doesn’t make it right and doesn’t mean we should continue doing so. I’m personally living proof that you can completely get past that line of thinking. (I say this as a former foodie and professional dessert maker/cake decorator whose entire identity was wrapped up in what I now consider not even to be edible food, for the most part. Yes, I really do know what it’s like, and yes, I really am completely away from that cycle and have been for a long, long time now.)

We tell ourselves that we can’t live without that sense of indulgence because we don’t take care of ourselves in the ways we need to most (time, energy, doing little things for ourselves that bring us joy), and that mistaken thought rules our lives.

Getting away from the emotional eating spiral

There is so much to write on this subject, and I’ve only managed to touch on a couple key points here, but I do hope this gives you some food for thought (no pun intended!) as you think about why you eat emotionally. Just know that there is a way out of this pattern, and it starts with recognizing some of the motivations for why you take the actions you do.

The next time the urge to overeat (or eat the wrong thing) strikes, perhaps whip out your journal and write out your feelings. You’d be amazed at what you might uncover. Likewise, you could call a trusted friend or (scarier, but often more helpful) simply just sit in your discomfort for a little while to see what happens. I know it might sound scary, but the worst that happens is you actually face the underlying pain. And the pain itself is actually worse — far worse, in fact, and more torturous to boot — the more you put off feeling it. When you eat for emotional reasons, food is only a mask and can never actually strip away the actual source of unhappiness. And since food is really there to nourish the body, if you really think about it, it’s wrong to “use it” for anything other than to get and stay healthy — physically and emotionally.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject, whether here on the blog or via email.