What Is Emotional Eating?
- Paulina Hupka
- Feb 10
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 11
As a nutritional counsellor, a human being with life experiences and a friend, I have noticed that our desire for health and beauty doesn’t always come from a healthy source.
Often, we say we want to be healthy which has become a code word for ‘skinny’. The obsession for ‘health’ and skinny is grounded in our society and what “they” deem beautiful and desirable.
While this is a whole other topic that I will cover in a future post, I want to focus on the 'side effects' of this desire to be healthy and how our biology, direct environment and physiological changes influence us to binge and develop unsatisfying sugar cravings and emotional eating.
These three aspects are core experiences for many individuals. They suffer from binge episodes, emotional eating to cope with emotions and plain sugar cravings.
What is Emotional Eating?
In our daily lives, we easily talk about emotional eating when we feel low, sad, anxious or frustrated and how we grab cookies, cake and just indulge in an extra piece of chocolate.
It is also not a coincidence that movies and TV series show people eating ice cream after a breakup, indulging in a bag of chips after a stressful day or nibbling on chocolate while cooking.
The simple definition of emotional eating is eating as a response to negative emotions.
However, these emotions are not always negative. Treating yourself as a reward can similarly be seen as part of emotional eating.
While it is not easy to identify how we have learned to eat as a reaction to emotions, some theories try to narrow it down.
Interoception is one theory. According to this, people lack a sense of internal awareness of body sensations; hunger and fullness in particular. These people may confuse their negative emotions with these sensations and respond by eating instead of regulating them.
The theory of cognitive processes implies that individuals with weight loss goals develop a strict mindset to achieve this goal. These dieting rules can look like all-or-nothing thinking (“I will never eat sugar again”).
As a result, slight violations of these rules can have the opposite effect. All strict rules are abandoned (“I already ate sugar today, so I might just eat all of it”).
In essence, negative emotions and strict internal rules clash and as a result, people let go of all their restraint and overeat.
Classic conditioning theory or learning-based emotional eating suggests that having negative emotions leads to a learned habit of eating delicious foods.
Basically, we have learned to cope with negative emotions by eating tasty treats. The pleasure of these foods acts as a reward, creating happy emotions such as contentment, satisfaction and joy. Eating has become a natural habit when negative emotions arise.[1]
These three theories play important roles when we try to explain emotional eating. They all include negative emotions and repeated behaviour to these feelings.
The first step out of this cycle is to distinguish emotional hunger from physical hunger:
Emotional Hunger | Physical Hunger |
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What you can do today!
Easy first steps you can do to address emotional eating:
Wait 15 minutes: Emotional hunger usually fades after some time. Instead of grabbing just something, hold on for 15 minutes and if you still want to have food, go for it.
Start an Emotion Journal: Every time you notice that you want to grab food (not a big meal), try to turn inwards first and identify what the emotion is that you are feeling: boredom, anxiety, frustration, nervousness.
Write it down and ask yourself, what this emotion means to you in this moment and how eating something will release this emotion.
Seek professional guidance: You can start by filling out my quiz to see where you land on the Emotional Eating scale.
Conclusion
Knowing what emotional eating is and what you can do is the first step towards your personal development, unlocking hidden traumas and improved health.
Emotions are your body's way of talking to you. Instead of pushing them awaywith random food, try to listen to what they are saying.
Be courageous and talk to someone that you trust. You are not alone in your experience, and there is help available.
Remember to try out the quiz to find out where you are at and where you can start.
Reach out
I also offer support regarding this topic as well. I’m not a therapist yet but in my Nutritional Counselling practice, we work on
Nutrition basics: foods, nutrients and physiological changes influenced by food intake
Mindset shifts: identifying limiting beliefs, lightening the weight of these and thought patterns
Mindfulness and relaxation: reframing unhelpful thoughts, learning about the nervous system and finding ways to regain balance
Body image and Societal Influences: how they shaped the world and how we see beauty
Sustainable habits: let go of unhelpful patterns and build new supportive routines and systems
[1] Reichenberger, J., Schnepper, R., Arend, A. K., & Blechert, J. (2020). Emotional eating in healthy individuals and patients with an eating disorder: evidence from psychometric, experimental and naturalistic studies. The Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 79(3), 290–299. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0029665120007004
[2] Emotional eating | HealthLink BC. (n.d.). https://www.healthlinkbc.ca/healthy-eating-physical-activity/food-and-nutrition/eating-habits/emotional-eating
[3] Berkman ND, Brownley KA, Peat CM, et al. Management and Outcomes of Binge-Eating Disorder [Internet]. Rockville (MD): Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US); 2015 Dec. (Comparative Effectiveness Reviews, No. 160.) Table 1, DSM-IV and DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for binge-eating disorder. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK338301/table/introduction.t1/
[4] Hantzidiamantis PJ, Awosika AO, Lappin SL. Physiology, Glucose. [Updated 2024 Apr 30]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2025 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK545201/
[5] Blum, K., Thanos, P. K., & Gold, M. S. (2014). Dopamine and glucose, obesity, and reward deficiency syndrome. Frontiers in psychology, 5, 919. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00919
