Binge Eating and Emotional Health
If you find yourself in a cycle of emotional, binge, or stress eating and want to change your compulsive eating behaviors, you’ve come to the right place! The first thing to understand is that food is many things, including safety and calm. It makes sense that you turn to food for survival, to soothe stress and challenging emotions. There is nothing wrong with you.
However, the coping strategies that once served you may end up working against your health or weight loss goals. Trying to lose weight or change your body without addressing the root causes of the eating behaviors is likely to lead right back to where you are today. It’s time for a new approach.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as trying a new diet or mindful eating. Finding a long-term solution to emotional eating requires deeper work.
Keep reading as we explore how to stop emotional eating and how Lizzy Swick Nutrition can help. We’ll cover:
- Stress binge eating and emotional health
- Why do people overeat when they are emotional?
- What are the causes of emotional eating?
- Emotional eating triggers – understanding why
- How to stop emotional overeating – a new strategy
- Mind body nutrition and emotional health strategies
- Getting unstuck, healing, and finding long-term solutions
Let’s dive in!
Understanding Binge Eating and Emotional Health
When an unmet emotional need or basic human need is not being met, eating too much becomes a coping mechanism. Emotions and eating become linked, and this pattern often has roots in childhood. It makes sense because overeating or eating certain foods (like sugar) releases dopamine, calms the nervous system, and creates a numbed-out feeling. Food becomes safety in an unsafe situation or environment.
Stress or an emotional trigger leads to food cravings and binge eating, which is often followed by guilt, shame, or self-judgment, leading to more eating. You may get caught in this cycle and have difficulty getting out.
The most critical thing to remember is that you don’t have a problem with food; the issue is feeling what you need to feel. While you may feel safe while eating, eating to soothe yourself is as Nicole Sachs says: safe in the unsafest way.
Why Do I Emotionally Eat? Exploring the Causes
Understanding emotional eating requires curiosity about what is going on underneath the food behaviors. What emotions are you avoiding? What are you trying to numb? Why are you doing what you are doing?
Your relationship may have been shaped by childhood experiences, traumatic events, and places in your life where you don’t process emotions. Understanding the deeper why is the key to changing your relationship with food and transforming your health and body.
How to Stop Emotional Eating: Strategies for Breaking the Cycle
The first step is tapping into your self-awareness and deciding that you want to change your relationship with food. Get honest with yourself about your behaviors and what’s driving them. Understand that old strategies, like dieting, haven’t offered long-term results because they don’t get to the root of the issue. Often dieting itself is a distraction from the deeper work.
Second, let go of the guilt, fear, and judgment. Changing your relationship with food requires coming from a place of self-love and compassion. From this place, your relationship with food becomes the doorway to understanding yourself and your needs.
Third, use the practical approach of inserting a pause between the impulse to binge and the binge itself. Are you physically hungry? Or is there an unmet need to address? Do you need to discharge stress or anger? Do you need to cry or rest? Is there a feeling you need to feel?
Coping Mechanisms for Emotional Eating: Healthier Alternatives
Cultivating new ways to cope and support emotional health requires understanding what the body needs and meeting the needs healthily. Emotional problems need emotional solutions. Food simply becomes a way to nourish the physical body.
For many, this can be difficult and uncomfortable work. It requires being with yourself and learning to express emotions, which takes patience and practice. You may need several daily rituals and many strategies in your toolkit.
Consider these three tenants for coping:
- Sharing – being seen and heard by a friend, therapist, or another trusted listener
- Writing – getting the emotions out through a journaling practice
- Processing – carving out time each day for self-connection
Trauma-Informed Nutrition Therapy: Healing the Root Causes
Traditional nutrition therapy focuses on food, which, as you’ve seen, is only the surface when it comes to binging and emotional eating. Trauma-informed nutrition therapy takes a broader and deeper view, understanding the intersections between brain science, behavior change therapy, and nutrition for mind-body healing. This approach honors your internal emotional needs and helps you meet those needs in nourishing ways that align with your weight and health goals. Spoiler: this is the multifaceted approach we take at Lizzy Swick Nutrition!
Will I Be an Emotional Eater Forever? Finding Long-Term Solutions
Changing your emotional eating behaviors requires choosing the harder, messier path. In the movement, choosing the path of least resistance and eating your feelings is easier, but long-term change requires more upfront work.
As you do the deeper (and more profound) work, you might notice your unwanted eating behaviors increasing at first and then subsiding more significantly. They might come back occasionally as a reminder or beacon, signaling you to look at another internal layer. This non-linear progression is all part of the process. It’s not perfect (and doesn’t need to be!), but when you put in the work from a loving place, you’ll see significant shifts over time as you heal the root causes.
Getting Unstuck from Emotional Eating
Consider binging and emotional eating a divine message, an incredible opportunity to turn inward and find new ways to care for yourself. You’ll have to be honest with yourself about what needs to be addressed differently and how you want to feel differently in your body. This exploration is the path to more freedom in your life.
The great news is that you don’t have to go at it alone. If you want to transform your relationship with food, lose weight, or get to the bottom of stress or binge eating behaviors, we are here to help! We’ll give you the roadmap, tools, and support you need to transform your health. We use a comprehensive and integrative approach. First you will have an intake and assessment with our registered dietitian and address the physiology embedded in emotional eating. Next you’ll receive counseling and education so you know what to expect and see your roadmap out of pain and relapse. Next, you’ll embark on a structured rehabilitation with your relationship with your body and mind by working with our personal trainer, and therapist. We will compassionately walk with you every step of the way, you are not alone.
If you read this article and already feel empowered, let’s begin! Reach out to Lizzy at [email protected] with subject line RECOVERY to receive a complimentary session with Lizzy today!
