Cope with Your Emotions with Kindness - Intuitive Eating Principle 7
Emotional eating is something that many people attest to struggling with. While it is normal to cope with food on occasion, it is important to know that food won’t fix any of these feelings. It may comfort for the short term, distract from the pain, or even numb you. But food won’t solve the problem. You need to deal with the source of the emotion. Food restriction, both physical and mental, can also trigger emotional eating.
Cope with your emotions with kindness is the is the seventh principle of a framework known as Intuitive Eating. If you’d like to learn more about the first six principles, check out these posts:
What is intuitive eating?
Intuitive eating is a non-diet approach to eating that was developed by two registered dietitians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. There are 10 principles of intuitive eating with a goal of helping you improve your relationship with food and your body.
Reject the diet mentality
Honor your hunger
Make peace with food
Challenge the food police
Discover the satisfaction factor
Feel your fullness
Cope with your emotions with kindness
Respect your body
Movement - feel the difference
Honor your health - gentle nutrition
New to intuitive eating and want to learn more? Check out this blog post.
Eating is emotional
Eating doesn't occur in a void and we eat for more than just fuel. A few examples of why we eat besides physical nourishment include:
Celebrating holidays (think about Thanksgiving feasts)
A middle school soccer team going out for ice cream after a victory
Indulging a special dinner after getting a promotion
Enjoying birthday cake on your special day
To dieters, this may seem like a problem. Diets often tell us that food is only fuel. It might seem "wrong" to eat for reasons beyond just physical nourishment. But it can sometimes be a healthy choice to eat when you are not actually hungry.
The ways we use food to cope
As mentioned, food is emotional. And there are many ways that we use food to cope with emotions.
Sensory gratification
Food gives us pleasure! Allowing yourself to enjoy the food that you eat can help improve satisfaction.
Comfort
Think of comfort foods. It's okay to eat food for comfort, just try to be present and not allow the food to numb you.
Distraction
Some people may use food to distract from negative feelings such as boredom, anxiety, sadness, and loneliness. It's normal to occasionally distract from your feelings, but this should not be happening on a regular basis.
Sedation
Have you ever been in a food coma? Using food to sedate your feelings keeps you from feeling your feelings. If you use food in this way, you might feel out of touch and zoned out.
Punishment
Emotional eating becomes so frequent for some that they start to use food to punish themselves and may eat in an angry manner. This can lead to self-hatred and disliking food altogether.
Emotional eating triggers
When you think of emotional eating, you might picture stress eating and boredom eating. But there are other emotions that can trigger emotional eating.
Excitement
There's nothing wrong with food feeling exciting! Some examples of eating in response to the emotion of excitement are making a reservation or trying a new restaurant.
However, sometimes this excitement to eat is a result of dieting. For example, those who partake in cheat days (which often accompany dieting) often feel very excited leading up to this day of eating off-limits foods.
Soothing
Food can remind us of happy time and therefore be soothing in times where we need that feeling. However, habitually eating to sooth can evolve to disconnected eating. Once again, food can feel good, but it just shouldn't be our only coping mechanism.
Boredom and procrastination
This is one of the most common triggers for emotional eating. Boredom can feel uncomfortable and using food can make it feel more tolerable.
Common situations that lead to boredom eating:
Not having plans for the day
Killing time
Mindlessly watching TV
Anger and frustration
The physical act of biting and crunching can help to release feelings of anger and rage for some people. This usually ends up being hard, crunchy foods like pretzels, chips, hard candy, carrots.
Stress and anxiety
Another very popular cause of emotional eating is stress and anxiety. Some people may overeat when stressed, some may find that stress turns off their hunger cues. There are of course many causes of stress and it is important to remember that dieting in itself can be a form of stress. In this way, dieting can lead to emotional eating.
Love
Food can help with connection and make people feel loved. Some examples include:
Giving food as gifts
Cooking for someone
Parents showing love by giving children food
How to cope with emotional eating
If you struggle with chronic and compulsive emotional eating and looking to recover from this, here are some tips.
When you feel and emotion that may trigger emotional eating, ask yourself "what do I feel right now?” Learn to pause and sit with your feelings.
After reflecting, ask yourself "what do I need right now?” If you are hungry - eat! Otherwise, identify if you are using food to cope with a different emotion.
Once you've identified what are in need of, ask yourself "how can I fulfill this need without turning to food?" It might help to create a self-care toolbox with a list of coping mechanisms. I describe how to make a self-care toolbox in this post here.
Bottom line
Cope with your emotions with kindness is the seventh principle of intuitive eating. Practicing this principle will help you to learn to identify emotional eating and establish alternate coping strategies.
If you are looking for more support in this area, we’d love to guide you inside The Nutrition Reboot Membership.
Up next
Principle 8 - Respect Your Body
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