How to Deal with Emotional Eating: An Expert Shares The Top Tips Every Woman Must Know
Emotional Eating. Most of us do it. As a culture, we all suffer from some level emotional eating, whether it be stress eating or comfort. Today’s woman dreamer, Tara Whitney, author of Hungry: Trust Your Body and Free Your Mind around Food, shares her expert tips on how to fight emotional eating urges in your daily life. She sheds light on crucial issues: body acceptance, shame, signs and symptoms, how to find other ways to process emotions, and how we can soothe ourselves without food. An informative and relatable take, enjoy Tara’s story below!
Tell us your story. You have written a book, blog, and you coach in emotional eating. What got you interested in the topic of emotional eating?
You could say I was my first client. I can still remember the first time I binged emotionally. I was 12 and was home alone on a Sunday afternoon. My urge to eat so much food came out of nowhere. I didn’t understand what happened to me. I felt so stunned and ashamed. I spent decades trying to figure out why I was struggling with emotional eating and how I could stop.
It wasn’t just one thing that helped me heal and move beyond emotional eating. There were a dozen or so practices that when put together gave me the freedom around food that I was so desperate for. I share my story and many of these tools that made a big difference for me and my clients in Hungry: Trust Your Body and Free Your Mind around Food.
I realized that by sharing my journey and process, I could save women that are struggling with food and their body so much time and heartache. On the Hungry: Trust Your Body. Free Your Mind podcast, I interview women who have transformed their own relationships with food and their body. I want my listeners to hear their unique stories and what opens up in other areas of our lives when we aren’t struggling with food and emotional eating.
How do you, as an emotional eating coach, help your clients? What tools do you use?
At the foundational level, I help my clients connect with their body. That may sound simple, but for many people it’s extremely challenging.
There are a few typical obstacles that people need to move through before they can connect with their body. Here are just a few.
Body Acceptance
We live in a culture that idealizes slim, lean and strong bodies that are rarely attainable. Not surprisingly, approximately 80% of women and 30% of men would change their body if they could. What often gets overlooked is the impact of the self-loathing, criticism and judgement that people have toward their body.
How can you connect with something you don’t respect or care about?
When clients start to recognize their body as an ally, they can start to connect with their body’s signals like hunger, fullness and emotions.
Dieting and Food Restriction
We all want to be healthy. However, health and weight loss are seen as synonymous. At any given point in time, forty five million Americans are dieting. Dieting is so common that many people don’t think their restricted eating patterns are dieting and instead are clean eating, getting healthy, cutting back on carbs, or staying away from sugar.
It’s well researched and documented that 90% of dieters gain weight back in 3 years and that 20-65% of dieters exhibit eating disordered behaviour. The desire for health isn’t the problem. Dieting and restricted eating results in binge eating, body disconnection, preoccupation with food, and intense feelings of guilt and shame.
Shame
Thanks to the work of Brene Brown, we now understand how shame works and the impact it has in our body.
Shame, the feeling that we are unworthy of love and belonging, triggers fear. Fear is a biological state where people respond with fight, flight, freeze or faint.
While in a state of fear, our body is prioritizing keeping ourselves safe. Our body feels very uncomfortable and is difficult to connect with.
I guide my clients to overcome these obstacles using the 10 principles of Intuitive Eating, guiding them to listen to and honor their bodies, process emotions and energy healings.
As a culture we all suffer from some level of emotional eating. What are some signs and examples of emotional overeating?
Yes! Our culture revolves around food and emotions! We mourn and friends and family bring us food for comfort. We celebrate the union of love with a wedding cake. Loved ones get together around a dining room table. When we have house parties, everyone stays in the kitchen where the food is.
We’ve been taught to soothe and celebrate with food, yet, when people turn to food when they’re stressed, overwhelmed, sad and lonely (all of the unwanted feelings), and fear weight gain, emotional eating obviously becomes a problem.
When people are eating emotionally to avoid or distract themselves from emotions, they often eat large amounts of food, they eat in secret when no one can witness them, and they often feel like they are eating on auto-pilot.
People will also avoid eating as a way of dealing with uncomfortable emotions. This is just another way they are neglecting and trying to avoid the needs of their body.
Why does emotional eating happen and why is it harmful?
Emotional eating, when done to distract and avoid uncomfortable emotions, is a way people try to cope. Food can give people temporary relief in their body, it can give them something to focus on and control when other areas of their life are out of control, and sadly, can be a way of expressing guilt and shame.
When someone is ready to heal from their emotional eating, they are exploring something very deep within themselves, something that they may not have had the ability or skills to explore in the past. The most harmful and heartbreaking thing about emotional eating is how debilitating it can be for the emotional eater. People that emotionally eat feel so much guilt and shame, they do it in hiding and they hate themselves for it.
Understanding and healing from emotional eating is an opportunity to no longer be coping and be able to support and soothe themselves in a much more loving and aligned way.
How do I avoid emotional eating when I'm sad, happy, depressed, stressed etc.?
Emotional eating has two components, emotions and trying to avoid feeling emotions and eating. If it weren’t for the uncomfortable emotions, you wouldn’t need food to soothe yourself.
I’m personally an advocate of you processing your emotions! As humans, we don’t have an ability to turn some emotions off and turn some emotions on. You’re ability to feel your sadness will increase your ability to feel your joy.
If you’re suspecting your emotional eating patterns came from some painful situations in your past that you’re not ready to confront, you can still learn how to move beyond emotional eating.
At one point, food may be the only tool you had. You can stop using food to soothe yourself but learning other ways to comfort and support yourself. Each of the tools I find to be the most effective is to create calm and ease in your body.
I’m offering a course starting on January 20th - Emotional Eating: Simple Ways to Soothe and Support Yourself without Food that will teach you how to soothe and support yourself without food.
How can I tell the difference between hunger and emotional eating?
Physical hunger isn’t always just a rumbly belly. Everyone experiences hunger differently and it can take some time getting to know how you experience physical hunger for yourself.
Hunger may be a dip in energy. You may have a hard time focusing and start to think about food and eating. Physical hunger can be patient. You can push it off for a bit. It doesn’t follow a clock and can vary day to day based on exercise levels, climate, stress, sleep, menstrual cycles, etc.
Emotional hunger is urgent and can come out of nowhere. You may not notice emotional hunger until you’re already eating. Many people who eat emotionally can feel like they’re on autopilot and like something has taken over their body. Often emotional eaters will reach for the foods that give them the biggest relief, foods high in fats, sugar and salt. These foods taste the best and give their body the best “feel good” surge.
Now that I avoided emotional eating, what do I do with those EMOTIONS?
Think about emotions as energy in the body. When energy gets stuck and emotions get bottled up, we naturally feel heavy, stuck, tired and agitated. This energy in our body just wants to move.
When we think about emotions as energy, we can feel neutral toward them and not judge how we feel.
There are a lot of ways to move the energy of an emotion. Sometimes it just needs to be acknowledged, noticing where it’s felt in the body and then giving it space to move. Other times, it may need more expression and time.
Ultimately, emotions pass when they are felt in our body.
As a Dreamcatchers platform we have to ask, what is your next big dream?
I’m writing my second book! I can’t wait to share it. I noticed how women’s relationship with food and their body have them hiding and showing the world a different version of themselves. This book is about what keeps women hiding from themselves and the world and how to to be truly seen.
Bio: Tara Whitney is a published author, podcaster, speaker and coach. She’s leading a revolution of women who are listening to their own internal wisdom, respecting and nourishing their bodies and ultimately trusting themselves in every area of their lives.
Her latest book, Hungry: Trust Your Body and Free Your Mind around Food, offers a fresh perspective on why women have struggled with food and gives them a path to set themselves free. Tara is also the host of the Hungry: Trust Your Body. Free Your Mind. podcast where she interviews some amazing guests who’ve transformed their own relationship with food. They share what their life is like now that their minds are free and they trust their bodies.
Starting her career as a CPA in public accounting, Tara is a serial entrepreneur and has founded and grown several businesses, including an accounting consulting firm and a yoga studio. Tara and her family, her husband and three children, live on the Seacoast of New Hampshire. She loves soaking in the gifts of the ocean, her meditation cushion and yoga mat.