What is Emotional Eating? Discerning our Hungers

With the hundreds of different diet plans and “healthy eating tips” about what to eat, and when, and why, it can be difficult to notice what kind of eating is normal and intuitive, and what is emotional eating.

If you’re worried about emotional eating, or overeating during the holidays, keep reading this article. You’ll learn about the different types of hunger and whether you’re actually overeating or if you’re just following different kinds of hunger cues.

What is emotional eating?

Emotional eating is when you use food as a coping mechanism in times of distress. While using food to cope is frowned upon by diet culture, it’s actually very normal to cope with some situations through food.

For example, people often bring food to others who are in pain. In many cultures, you are expected to bring food to a funeral wake. You might also bring your best friend their favorite food after a breakup. In these instances, emotional eating is normal.

Experts have determined that emotional eating to cope with distress is a good thing—so long as emotional eating is not your only coping skill.

Emotional eating, just as any coping skill such as exercise or watching TV, is okay in moderation. You need to balance out different coping skills to make sure you’re not chronically relying only on one thing to make you feel better.

What types of hunger are there?

There are four main types of hunger:

1. Physical Hunger: Hunger as a way to signal that you need more nutrition to sustain yourself throughout the day.
2. Emotional Hunger: Hunger that arises from an unmet emotional need.
3. Sensory Hunger: Hunger in response to seeing, smelling, hearing about, or thinking of a certain food.
4. Anticipatory Hunger: When you do not feel hungry in the moment, but expect to be hungry later and will not have access to food at that time. In these cases, you eat to make sure you’ll have fuel later on.

Why is it important to recognize and honor all types of hunger, even emotional eating?

Many diet plans tell you to ignore your physical hunger, “overcome” your emotional hunger, deny yourself the sensory pleasures of certain foods, or wait to eat until you’re “actually hungry.”

However, ignoring and denying your hunger will only backfire, in many possible ways. For example:

• Restricting your food intake during the day often leads to binge eating later on.
• “Not allowing” certain kinds of “unhealthy” foods that make you feel “out of control” will only lead to binge eating that food later on.
• Waiting until you’re absolutely famished to eat often leads to moodiness, irritation, brain fog, etc.
• Keeping certain “rules” about eating food can lead someone to develop an eating disorder.

To honor your hunger, you have to practice intuitive eating and allow all foods in your diet.

Overeating During the Holidays

With the holidays comes a lot of joy, events, togetherness — and food. Along with that food comes a lot of diet culture messaging about not “ruining your diet” over the holidays or “getting back on track” after they’re over.

However, overeating during the holidays is normal. It’s not anything to be ashamed of.

Think about it: You’re presented with an array of delicious foods, foods that represent tradition and nostalgia, and foods as gifts from loved ones. Of course you might eat past fullness during a special dinner or at a party where everyone has brought special food to try.

Instead of being angry at yourself for overeating, why not just accept that it’s normal? Accept that overeating happens, and get back to mindfully eating just until you’re satisfied physically and emotionally the next day.

Whatever you do, don’t avoid eating after an episode of overeating, and don’t “ban” any foods that you have had a little too much of during that episode.

If you do, you might get caught in a cycle of restricting your food intake physically or emotionally, and then binge eat out of hunger. It’s a vicious cycle that many binge eaters have a hard time getting out of.

Be kind to yourself right now. Don’t worry about a diet more than enjoying a meal or treat. When you’re older, you won’t be thinking of whether you “broke your diet” — you’ll be thinking of all the holiday events and traditions you got to be a part of.