31 | The Physiology & Psychology of Emotional Eating: You’re Not Broken, You’re Human

How to: Fitness

This episode is one of our longest and, hopefully, one that can be supportive to many. We dive into a comprehensive discussion on emotional eating, the normal physical and physiological processes that play a role, and the impact of stress on eating habits.

5:30 Different individuals have different stress responses and find their appetite impacted differently by stress. While many find they have no appetite when stress is high, others turn to food for comfort and find themselves emotionally eating more. Both are normal responses and neither are character flaws. Emotional eating is when we use food for comfort rather than to satisfy actual physical hunger.

7:30 Kummerspeck: https://germanyinusa.com/2021/10/19/word-of-the-week-kummerspeck/

8:59 The Stress in America Survey sheds light on how common stress eating is. The survey finds that these behaviors are higher in women, in teen girls, and among millennials. It is also found that the percentage of those skipping meals due to stress is higher among teen girls and millennials.

14:55 The human brain has a very complex reward system that drives all of our behaviors. Serotonin and dopamine are two really important players in this system.

19:45 A compulsive eating response to stress can be due to either conditioning or genetics. It can be a learned behavior due to how we view food and use it as a coping mechanism.

25:30 Learned behaviors also include outside social influences and cultural norms. Negative social comparison is associated with an increased risk of emotional eating.

32:03 Survey data shows that feelings of guilt and shame often accompany episodes of emotional eating. There are also health risks when emotional eating leads to overconsumption.

35:50 What do we do to reroute behaviors so emotional eating isn’t our only tool for coping with stress? The “solutions” to stopping emotional eating are not about having more self control or willpower; that notion only promotes restriction.

39:00 Practice #1: Recognizing physical vs. emotional hunger. When we have physical hunger, the solution is to eat. When we have psychological hunger, the goal is to recognize it.

44:23 Practice #2: Creating awareness around our hunger and fullness cues. We can often thank diet culture for being out of sync with our hunger cues, but reacquainting ourselves with our cues can help us not constantly feel cravings.

48:19 Practice #3: Bringing mindfulness to food choices. Individuals with compulsive eating tendencies are those who benefit most from mindful eating techniques, and there are benefits in insulin resistance, lower stress levels, and long term weight loss. Recommended reading: Eating Mindfully by Susan Albers.

52:52 Practice #4: Redirecting our stress. We can have practices that also help us bring down our stress levels, activate our PNS, and stimulate our vagus nerve. These practices create a buffer between us and food.

56:29 If we think that we can't control our food — that our worth is tied to their bodies or tied to our eating habits — we're reinforcing this idea that overeating stress eating helps manage these emotions and perpetuates the cycle.

Strategies that didn’t make it into the episode: relying on preparation over willpower & changing our environment. Due to limited space in show notes, email for references & more: [e-mail]

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