People often use the quote “Let thy food be thy medicine” to discuss the importance of eating healthy or “clean.” And there is some truth to that. Many chronic health conditions can be improved, managed, or avoided altogether through food.
But if you focus just on physical functioning, you’re missing a huge part of your overall well-being.
Health is more than physical
“Food is medicine” means more than “clean eating” to me. Sometimes, chocolate is medicinal. Sometimes a can of Pepsi is medicinal. Or a bag of chips.
Emotional eating works. It releases happy chemicals in your brain. It helps you to calm down. It gives sensory input. It gives you a sense of control. It literally fuels your body and brain.
At the same time, emotional eating can create chaos in your brain and body when it is overused as a coping strategy. The same thing can be said for every coping strategy.
For nearly everyone on the planet, meditating for 12 hours a day every day would cause a significant amount of problems in their life. Yet people all over the internet and in real life recommend trying mindfulness (including me)!
So why do we villainize emotional eating so much?
“Just eat in moderation.”
Well… I went on a whole rant about the concept of moderation before, so you can just go read that after this gentle rant. Suffice to say, I don’t think much about the idea of moderation as a goal.
What this comment is saying is that someone who uses emotional eating as a primary coping skill is weak, immoral, and probably stupid.
Honestly, it’s probably those same cultural beliefs that led that person to use emotional eating as a primary coping skill in the first place. The shame runs deep in North American culture.
The more you eat for emotional reasons and the more shame you experience from doing so, the more likely you are to hide your emotions by numbing out with food — and therefore you’re not going to be looking at the underlying needs to build out a toolbox that would meet your needs better than food.
Coping strategies are skills
Just like you shouldn’t expect to be an expert at playing basketball or painting a landscape the first time you try it, you aren’t going to be an expert at mindfulness or journaling or even knowing what you are feeling the first time you try.
You have been using emotional eating as a coping strategy for how long? You have gotten really good at it. No wonder it helps you feel better, at least at first.
And that is all your brain cares about — the short-term benefits. You have a need, and your brain wants to meet that need as quickly as possible. You have learned that emotional eating gets you a fast result. Therefore, your brain is going to immediately go there every time.
Why does emotional eating work?
That stimulation can be a powerful thing, and not just for alertness. The stimulation you get from eating can distract you from how you feel, physically or emotionally. It can allow you to ignore the issues that are stressing you out. And the physical act of eating is soothing for most people. It’s one of many reasons why you may eat mindlessly when you are in a flare.
There is also the influence of your past experiences with food. I think a huge part of why I like Pepsi is because it brings back memories of my Grampa’s house, both recent and from my childhood. We associate food with celebrations and people. Those associations bring positive emotions to the front of your mind.
Bottom line: there are both psychological factors (memories & learned associations) and biology (including the neurotransmitters in your brain) at play. Unfortunately, I do not have time to go on a long rabbit hole to better understand and explain the neurochemistry myself (although I now have several new articles in my to-be-read pile). I did find a nice article that sums up the key points, though it doesn’t dive deeply into the brain chemistry: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-neuroscience-of-emotional-eating-43170.
When shouldn’t you eat for emotional reasons?
So we’ve established that emotional eating works. But that’s not what you came here for. You came to this article because you want to learn how to stop stress eating. As much as it can work in the short-term, it can cause issues in the long-term — or even not so long!
The downsides of emotional eating can be mingled in with the benefits — the shame, the guilt, the bloating… It doesn’t take long for the side effects to be felt. And that’s not even considering the longer-term risks of poor diet choices (because most of us are not eating a balanced meal while eating emotionally!).
So, when should you choose not to eat emotionally? Whenever there is a better option.
For an example of a balanced diet, you may be interested in the Anti-Inflammatory Mediterranean Diet.
Build Your Toolbox
In order to have strategies at your disposal, you need to practice other skills. It will be awkward, uncomfortable, and hard at first. There will be times when you simply do not have the capacity to think about the toolbox.
There will be times when emotional eating is the best answer. Possibly because it is the only answer available to you or possibly because it is legitimately a good answer.
The more you practice, though, the larger and more shiny your toolbox will be. It will be easier to take a pause when you are feeling a feeling so that you can recognize the need. It will be easier to match the need with an effective answer.
As you start looking to build your toolbox, you may also be interested in getting support, including from a dietitian.
Respond, don’t react
Instead of your brain matching feeling-food, you can actively make a decision:
Feeling → Question → Need → Answer
The feeling will start to prompt you to ask a question, instead of jumping to the conclusion of food. Again, sometimes the answer will still be food, but it will be a decision rather than a mindless action. A response rather than a reaction.
Let’s bring back mindful eating
You didn’t think I’d actually just leave you hanging on the how, did you? If you know me, you’ve already gathered that I’d bring it back to mindful eating.
The coolest thing about mindful eating is that it helps you insert the pause where you can reflect on your actual need AND you can get more benefits from emotional eating.
I’ve already established that emotional eating is a coping strategy, and mindful eating helps you get more from emotional eating. When you eat mindfully, you get to taste your food more (because you’re not distracted by yourself or your surroundings), so you enjoy it more. Mindful eating also helps you to drop the judgments. Food is food. Your sensory experience just is. Your body just is. Dropping the shame and judgments around emotional eating allows you to utilize it as the tool that it is, and to know when your need has been met.
If you’re coming from the diet cycle, you’ll read that and think, “Great, I’ll eat less and lose weight!” But that is a judgment that you’ll need to work to release in mindful eating. There is no goal to change, simply to observe what is. Then you can respond compassionately in ways that feel balanced.
The Misunderstood Magic of Mindful Eating
Mindful eating is fundamentally about letting go of all judgments and experiencing the present moment. It is mindfulness meditation applied to eating.
Therefore, you cannot “mindfully eat” your way to any specific changes.
At the same time, most people embarking on mindful eating will gradually drift towards a balanced diet. When you pay attention to your experience while eating, you will notice that it feels good to be in balance.
But most of all, it feels good to have enough without having too much. But both ‘enough’ and ‘too much’ are highly subjective and individual. The sheer number of factors that influence the amount of food an individual person needs makes it impractical to calculate. Remember that perfect doesn’t exist. While we can calculate what the average person needs, average is a mathematical construct that doesn’t exist in the real world.
But we don’t need to consciously analyze and calculate. Your body can tell you. Your hunger and satiety signals are one way that your body talks to your brain. There are so many signals that your body sends to your conscious mind, but it takes practice to listen and hear those signals
Mindful eating alone will get most people close enough to a balanced diet. The deep awareness of your experience can uncover those subtle hints that get buried when we eat for emotional reasons, to numb our feelings, or cope with life. When we are distracted by the scroll hole, the internet at large, TV, or all the things we need and want to do in life, we cannot notice the signals our body is yelling at us. And when we are exhausted and in pain, ignoring our body becomes a coping mechanism to avoid feeling the pain and fatigue.
But mindful eating allows you to reconnect with your body. It brings you more joy from your food — because you are actually tasting the food that you are eating. And it allows you to experience your body in a positive way. Just like you don’t want to be around that relative who is complaining 24/7, it’s hard to listen to your body when all you notice is the pain and fatigue. Intentionally giving yourself positive experiences with your body (mindful eating) helps to repair your relationship with yourself and your body.
Many of us are privileged to have constant access to food. On the scale of human history, this is a massive win. We are privileged to be able to use food and eating as a coping skill. It works. But it is not without its drawbacks.
So a well-rounded toolbox is the key to being able to keep perspective that food is food. Eating is good.
Your body is good — even when you are in pain — because it allows you to experience this world.
Mindfulness is a tool to help you better use other tools in your toolbox.
Try mindful eating. In particular, I’d encourage you to try it the next time you have a craving for a treat. Not necessarily in the midst of major stress or high emotion. But the next time you notice a desire for a treat, give mindful eating a go. Enjoy that treat fully.
Then reflect on how you could bring that experience to other eating experiences.
If you would like support on building your mindful eating practice, you can find out more about individual support at https://samanthaholmgren.ca/coaching.
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