Emotional Eating: Practical Tips to Retrain Your Brain

Some of the most frequent conversations I have with clients are about emotional eating, and for good reason. Food is a lot of things, and it is a comfort in many cases. For most of our lives, we’re inundated with messages from the media, from society, to use food as comfort, and there are physiological reasons why this connection is so strong! So as a coach I want you to practice breaking the direct line between food and comfort, and more than that, the concept that food = the ONLY comfort.

Why Emotional Eating is So Powerful

So why is the mental connection to emotional eating so strong? Let’s look at the science behind it, and then we’ll explore what we can do to change it. 

The Science Behind Emotional Eating

Our appetite is controlled in two different pathways in the body:

• We have the homeostatic pathway, which is controlled by the release of hormones to signal either hunger or fullness based on physiological signals in the body - informing our brains that we need to eat, or that we need to stop.

• Then, we have the hedonic pathway, which we’re going to look at in more detail.

When we eat comforting or palatable foods, these typically being foods higher in sugar or fat, we feel comfort and pleasure in that sensory experience. Long story short, the reward center is activated and dopamine is released, giving the physiological sensation of pleasure. As humans, we love pleasure! We love feeling happy and emotionally satisfied, so it’s only fair that we like this feeling the food gave us! Then, in our minds, we start to associate these palatable, tasty foods with pleasure even more, and we crave them for the pleasure that they DO provide….it goes from a “like” to a “want” or “need.” Our brains know when we desire these foods and then go on to satisfy that desire, we feel that comfort/pleasure, and it becomes something we don’t even have to think consciously about, to end up turning to anyway.¹ With more and more time, stress, emotion, boredom, etc., this can disrupt the homeostatic pathway for hunger, to the point that it can genuinely be hard to distinguish between the two - the hedonic pathway can even end up “overriding” our physical hunger or fullness cues.²

It only makes sense - when we’re stressed, bored, or upset, our natural response is to look for pleasure. And what do we know will release that dopamine and give us pleasure? Those comforting, yummy foods.

Breaking the Emotional Eating Cycle

So we know there’s a physiological aspect to WHY we mentally crave these foods, especially when we’re feeling emotions like stress, boredom, or frustration. But for so many of my clients, they don’t want to feel beholden to this feeling - they want to be able to enjoy these foods here and there, without feeling like they don’t have a choice in the matter. So…where do we go from here? 

Building New Coping Mechanisms

It’s not something that’s “fixed” in a week or even a month. You’ve had years of reinforcement, just from the ups and downs of life, that food = pleasure, comfort, even simply the absence of discomfort. For many of us, the starting point is NOT simply replacing the eating with another coping skill - because in a lot of cases, we don’t even feel we have other coping behaviors, so it’s hard to even think of anything else as an option for comfort.

From that starting point, it’s not about white-knuckling your way through it before you’re ready, but instead, retraining your brain as if you’re starting from scratch to build an arsenal of coping behaviors other than food. If you feel like you don’t have any other options but food right now, here’s a method to try as a starting point, to start practicing getting your mind to see other behaviors as comforts too.

Practical Steps to Start Retraining Your Brain

1. When you feel emotion or stress and the urge to eat hits you, wait. Do something else FIRST. It won’t feel quite as comforting at first; like I said, you’ve had years of constant reinforcement that food is what will ‘work,’ so don’t expect something different to work immediately. But do something else anyway. Something like: 

• Taking a walk, or even just sitting on the porch to get some fresh air.

• Playing with your pet.

• Following a 5 minute meditation app.

• Journaling your feelings.

• Calling a friend to talk.

• Taking up a new craft or game (we’ve been doing a lot of puzzles lately at my house to relax, lol!).

2. Set yourself a 10-15 minute timer and engage in that new activity to bring a source of enjoyment, a time to rest, or some method for mental engagement in something outside of food.

3. After those 10-15 minutes are up, sit with yourself and feel how you’re feeling physically. Do you still feel that need for the food? If you don’t, great - move on with your day! If you DO, that’s okay too - eat the food then! Plate up a portion, sit with it, eat slowly, notice how you are feeling physically and mentally, and try to treat it like any other meal.

Focus on Progress, Not Perfection

Once again, the goal right now is not to white-knuckle our way into never eating that food again, but instead, to break that immediate reinforcement between the stimulus (stress, emotion, boredom, etc.) and the reward behavior (the food) with nothing else involved. As we incorporate other behaviors, we can condition our minds to see them as soothing, just like food.

As a dietitian I want you to feel like you have options to care for yourself. I want you to feel like you have a choice and you’re empowered to make every choice for yourself. Sometimes the choice might be food. Sometimes it might not be. But I never want you to feel like you have NO choice - like the choice is already made for you, and you have no power in the situation for yourself.

Take the Next Step

If you relate, and feel like you need to build up a new arsenal of behaviors/activities to soothe yourself, try this strategy out this week, and let us know how it goes for you! And remember, it takes TIME - you’ve had years and years of life for this conditioning to take place with food, so be patient with yourself, have grace with the process. You’re not a bad person if you still want to eat the food after the activity—that’s literally one of the two options here as we start! The key is committing to working on this consistently as a first step. And if you do feel out of control with food, and more like it controls you, I recommend reaching out to a specialized therapist or counselor. There is no better power than building a team of support around you, from professionals who want to make sure you receive ALL of the care you need to thrive. 

Written by: Sam Lazar, RD, LD, Black Iron Nutrition Coach

References

¹ Volkow ND, Wang GJ, Baler RD. Reward, dopamine and the control of food intake: implications for obesity. Trends Cogn Sci. 2011;15(1):37-46. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2010.11.001

² Alonso-Alonso M, Woods SC, Pelchat M, et al. Food reward system: current perspectives and future research needs. Nutr Rev. 2015;73(5):296-307. doi:10.1093/nutrit/nuv002