How many emotional eaters are there out there?

OK - here is my 100% un-scientific answer, but I think it all comes back to survival. Back in the "good old days", when cave people were cave people, we were told what we needed by our bodies after they went into a basic "stress". We slept when we were tired (tired feeling = stress reaction on the body), we drank when we were thirsty (thirsty = stress reaction on the body) and we went on a hunt or a gather when our bellies started to groan with hunger (hunger feeling = stress reaction on the body).

Stress wasn't caused by missing a promotion or failing an exam, not being able to afford a great handbag or because we looked terrible in the skinny jeans that looked fantastic in the catalogue but awful in front of the mirror, it was caused by the bodily possibility that you might die from starvation/dehydration/exposure or...erm....being eaten or something. Now - we (and I'm talking in the rich world here) are lucky enough to have shelter and enough food and we are generally not in danger of being eaten, when our "stress" reactions kick in because of some of the more modern "issues" we face, we turn to "something" to make it better. That used to be food or drink or hunting. Hence people now eat, drink (maybe alcohol) or fight to relieve stress.

What do you reckon?

Yes - it's rubbish isn't it....oh well, I tried.

definitely the brain. Actually, food is a good thing, but instead of eating to live, a lot of us have lived to eat. Food has been my drug of choice, as opposed to alcohol or drugs. It's easy, it's socially acceptable, it's the way we celebrate in families, at work, at church, it's how we grieve, at funerals or other losses; It numbs out our feelings of pain. Food has a sedating property for me. It makes me lazy if I eat too much, and when I eat too much sugar , the next day I am lethargic and cranky (my kids will vouch for the cranky). It's cheap, especially the junk food. It has a looooong shelf life, at least the junk food. It keeps our mouths and our hands busy, and in doing that, keeps our brains busy, and we avoid pain. My opinion, but add me if you want. I would love to be your MFP pal and help us motivate each other!

I've always had the opposite problem. When my stress is high my stomach shuts down. I will literally get sick If I try to force food down. However when I'm relaxed and happy all I do is eat. Sigh...getting to see my bf puts me on the road to sitting on the couch mainlining ben and jerrys :laugh:

im more of a flamboyant eater.

Oh yeah big time emotional eater here. It is truly my biggest source of comfort. I've done really well the last two months and am on a good path, but yeah when I am off the wagon I am there in spades.

My size 0 sister actually was able to emphasize with me on this issue this summer. She said something about how hard she imagines this cycle is because she LOVES food too. She is a worse eater than I am (she has a medical reason that she stays skinny). She said she knows I am (was) depressed about my weight and that eating makes me feel better, but then it makes me gain weight which makes me depressed and so on and so on. While I realize its a no-brainer that I need to stop emotional eating to break the cycle, it still helped to hear her emphasize. Previously all I have felt from her is disdain, but hearing her sympathy made me feel like I healed a little bit. I know that sounds cheesy and dumb, but it did help.

Tough love has never had any effect other than making me not bug others with my problems. The problems were still there, and the tough love approach ("just make better choices") actually made things worse. Her sympathy helped me open up about my pain and struggles and put me on a path to healthiness and seeking the support I need to overcome this issue.

One HUGE thing that has helped me overcome emotional eating, and something I just realized while reading these posts, is the location of my new job. I have to drive by the gym I joined on my way home from work. Thanks to my wonderfully supportive family, who is picking up my slack in getting my daughter after school, it has become routine for me to stop at the gym after work. This disrupts the time when I would engage in emotional/stress eating. Then I get home and make dinner, but feel so good from having worked out that I am able to avoid that bag of chips. And after dinner I don't want to counteract that positive gym thing so I don't snack in the evening.

Spikes in adrenaline and cortisol, as I understand it, trigger an urgent physiological desire to seek out calorie-dense foods. This is connected to the fight or flight response. If you were an animal running from a predator, you would want to consume enough energy to sustain your fight or flight.

definately an emotional eater here!! I can eat when happy, sad and everything in between for sure!! Find stress is a big factor in my eating too!!! I started my healthy eating plan as I vowed to loose a stone by my Birthday (17th October) and started off really well but then things cropped up with work and just went downhill again - unfortunately I always reach for high carb, high fat foods and now struggling again to wean myself off them again so sadly unless something drastic happens I think my goal may just be out of reach now!!

Yep, me too! Sometimes I want to eat even though I'm not hungry when I'm happy, sad, or anything in between like you said....

It's not so bad that I can't control it (most of the time lol), but it does get very annoying sometimes. I think we just have to remember that food is fuel.. and reaching for food when we feel sad or upset is not really going to make us feel better in the long run..

I have learned that I go for the snacks when I get angry or sad. For a while, that is all that I did. Sometimes when I get upset now, I go and look for something to eat, but lucky for me, there is nothing in the house that I want to snack on. Just like an alcoholic should not have alcohol around, I should not have any oreo's, candies etc available for me. When I am out in public, I am fine. I do not want it. So, I know all of the horrible snacking I did was emotional.

When I am bored, I grab a diet coke and look for something to snack on. I am trying slowly to get the diet coke out of my life. But, I still have one a day.

I think logging the food everyday has helped me alot and made me understand why I ate some of the things I did. I have come a long way and emotional eating will still be around. I am learning to control it.

I've studied this a lot and being an emotional eater can be due to one of several reasons:

1. It could, as others have said, become a habit because we like the Dopamine 'high' from eating sugary foods - and we will indeed need more of those foods to get that same 'high' over a period of time. So we feel low, somewhere in our brain lies the thought 'sugar/high fat/fast food makes me feel better' and it then becomes a habit, triggered by our emotional state.

2. It could be a parental pattern. If our parents were emotional eaters or struggled with weight, then we will have been subconsciously taught that pattern as children. We then reach adulthood and wonder how/why we got there.

3. It could be self sabotage or punishment. Many people have had troubled childhoods in which there was abuse, or emotional harm in some way (these don't even have to be severe cases, there could just have been one angry, moody, shouty, disrespectful or depressed parent). Again, its a psychological, ingrained pattern. As kids, we were used to having a negative emotion directed at us. As adults, the person who directed that negativity toward us may not be present any more, but our 'system' is still used to and feels more comfortable with that negative treatment as that is what translates in our brain as 'normal' (crazy, but true!). So we draw negative relationships to ourselves that mirror aspects of our childhood. If no one else is giving it to us, we attack ourselves so may use food or act out & do things that ensure that somehow, we are receiving 'negative treatment'. This also ties in with self sabotage - if we have really low self esteem due to parents/family/siblings/teachers/peers that were critical or unsupportive, every time we feel like we're going to achieve something as an adult, its too alien to us, so we tear ourselves down again (self sabotage). Its sad how many adults are unhappy because of this particular psychology and it is rife in society!

4. It could be a way of avoiding emotion. If we can't handle the amount of stress or high emotion in our lives, then we literally swallow it down with food. The emotion gets swallowed up in the food, dopamine in the brain is released and hey presto, the negative emotion goes away (for a very short period of time....then it becomes habit forming....see point 1).

5. We don't feel safe. Gaining a lot of weight suddenly and keeping it there may mean we do not feel safe - either in our job, home or relationship and therefore are literally surrounding ourselves with layers of fat as a method of physical protection.

9 times out've 10, we will fall into one of the above categories and often several at once - all of them are usually attached to low self esteem on some level too.

The majority root cause of weight gain is down to lack of education, laziness or one of the above. So whilst we work out at the gym and can discipline and place goals on ourselves, if one of the above patterns is running through our lives, then we may constantly battle not to slip back into old habits.

Our actions are doing one thing (dieting, working out), but our subconscious brain is controlling us with one of the above patterns, which are much stronger than anything else. Our subconscious brain runs our lives. It would eliminate the diet 'battle' to actually explore the mental/emotional places we're in and pay attention to what our triggers are, why they are there and how to eliminate them - alongside working out and eating healthy on a physical level. If you recognise any of the above, then know you need to deal with yourself as a whole package - mental, emotional, physical and for some (depending on belief), spiritual. Otherwise, you may stay on the diet/work out see-saw for life.

Unless you're lazy, in which case, none of this applies, put down that fast food and get your bum in the gym ;-)

I know what you mean. I was doing so good until my father passed away a month ago and I can seem to get back to eating right and exercising.

It's biological. I heard a couple of researchers on talk radio a few months ago. They discovered that if you put any animal into a stressful situation, the animal responds by increasing its food intake in general, especially high-sugar carbs. Even grasshoppers do it.

Yesterday I had a very stressful afternoon of fighting with my computer (which I depend on to do my job). My eating plan completely unhinged. If I eat that way every day, in 5 weeks, I'll be heavier than I am right now. Lovely.

Back on track today.

Here's the scientific answer: There is no such thing as an emotionLESS eater. For all people, eating activates the pleasure/reward centers of the brain and neurotransmitters are released that cause us to feel a sense of general well-being. Functional MRI scans on the extremely obese (those who have become immobile due to weight) show that, for them, the brain offers such an intense pleasure response, it mimics the brain patterns of heroin addicts while taking heroin. Most of us do not have that kind of response, however they degree of pleasure we feel after eating will vary from some degree from person to person. Divorcing eating from emotional pleasure is not healthy and I am not certain that it is even possible. We could counter it with painful feelings of guilt and shame about eating, but that does not take away the comfort and good feeling it can also give.

I think that the key is understanding how this works and using it wisely. There are lots of other things that can comfort and give us pleasure, and there are healthier food options. By and large, warmer foods trigger the autonomic nervous system to calm, so even a cup of tea can be helpful and comforting. People, in general, tend to find difficulty in life when they rely on one specific way of coping with stress in the world, and this often backfires because one solution can't fit every situation and, in addition, a single repeated behavior often has consequences. Addictions, zoning out to TV or internet all day, a long succession of unsatisfying relationships, always putting others' needs first in ways that become destructive to one's own life; these can all be looked at as ways that people rely on one specific way of coping.

Life is stressful, and I don't think that will change anytime soon. Eating will always feel good, and should. Only eating in response to stress won't turn out well. Try developing many different ways to comfort yourself, and try taking a more active role in reducing stress in whatever way possible. Specifically, mindfulness meditation, just 20 minutes a day, alters neurology in such a way as to increase our tolerance of stress. Mindfulness meditation just means noticing your experience without judgement, and there's tons of information on that out on the internet and in books. Talk to friends (also shows to calm up-regulated brains), exercise (get some good nuerotransmitters flowing), have an absorbing hobby that can serve as an escape, or just yell at that *kitten* causing all the problems.

Coping with life is a skill, and you gotta have a lot of tools in your backpack, not just one, to really deal with it properly.

Hope that helps.

Does bored count as an emotional eater? All I want to do at work when I have nothing to do is eat. This is why nights and weekends are so much easier for me. I read, write, paint, workout etc and have no desire to eat. Week days, I go to my desk job, finish my work then sit & stare at the computer for the next 6-8 hours.

I used to do this too! My workouts have helped with this because now I don't have as much "down time" as I used to. I have had to readjust to eating when hungry....and really pay attention to that. It is working so far!!