How Stress and Comfort Eating Causes Weight Gain

The strongest cravings for food usually happen when people are emotionally at their lowest or most vulnerable. People may turn to food consciously or unconsciously to help them deal with stress, worry anxiety, depression and any range of negative emotions. This is also known as emotional eating. Emotional eating can lead to overeating and obesity.

Why Do People Emotionally Eat?

People often use food to soothe or suppress negative emotions, such as loneliness, sadness, boredom, fear, anger, anxiety, depression, and stress. Daily life can trigger these emotions and ultimately can lead someone to begin overeating. Director of the TRIAD Weight Management Center at the Massachusetts McLean Hospital, Dr. Judith Wurtman, states that comfort foods are a type of edible tranquilizer that people are using to self-medicate in times of stress.

Let’s face it, when people are stressed they are not reaching for a salad or fruit smoothies. They are reaching for the cookies, chips, rich gravies, and fried foods. There are several triggers that can contribute to emotional eating such as:

Financial problems
Unemployment
Work stress
Relationship problems
Poor health
General fatigue

Although there are some people that tend to eat less when they are emotionally stressed, the majority of individuals tend to overeat or participate in binge eating. Many people’s emotions are so closely tied to their eating habits that they unconsciously reach for that bag of honey buns or cookie whenever they are upset without stopping to think or notice what it is they are doing.

What’s the Bottom-line?

Food is being used to serve as a distraction. If a person is brooding over an unresolved conflict or upset about an upcoming event, then he or she may focus on consuming comfort food, instead of facing a painful conflict. Regardless of what emotions drove them to overeat, the end result is always the same. The negative emotions come back and now there is a sense of guilt over having eaten too much.

In addition, the weight gain from such behavior can increase the negative emotions even more, sending the person into a vicious cycle of overeating, guilt, and overeating all over again. Negative emotions trigger the individual to overeat: they beat themselves up over getting off track with their diet and weight loss, they feel bad, and they start the process all over again.

Tips to Gain Control of Emotional Eating

Although it is a vicious cycle, there is something you can do. With just a few short adjustments, you can gain a new lease on life, so to speak:

1. Relax more - Learn meditation or yoga. Find a comfortable and quiet place for at least one hour, undisturbed, so you can wind down and relax daily.

2. Give your craving some time - If you’ve just eaten, give yourself thirty minutes to an hour before eating. Often, you’ll find that it’s not really hunger but an emotional stressor that’s making you think that you are hungry.

3. Substitute raw veggies and fruits - If you absolutely must have a piece of cake or mashed potatoes with gravy, eat a healthy portion of raw veggies or fruits. A healthy salad eaten before a meal can fill you up to where you won’t want much of the “bad" food.

4. Drink 2 glasses of water before eating - Drink a lot of water before you eat, so that you will feel full faster with less food.

A lot of people are guilty of emotional eating, and there is really nothing wrong with it. In today’s day and age, there are just so many things to deal with that no one is immune from stress and anxiety. Understanding why you are overeating is going to be a big key to your weight loss success.

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