Those of you who have read some of my previous articles know that this blog is documenting my journey while it’s happening, it’s not just a description of how a life I’ve figured out. I say this because I want to make something very clear: I haven’t stopped emotional eating. I’m fighting it, and if you’ve come across this article it’s likely that you’re struggling against it, too. Luckily, during the last months I’ve gotten significantly better at managing my urges to eat unhealthy foods in the most inappropriate moments.
I’m no stranger to this topic: I’ve been overweight for most of my life. I’ve lost a lot of weight, I gained it back, then again and again, so much that I can’t count the amount of diets I’ve been on. If I could add all the kilos I’ve lost during my life, I’d surely get a number higher than my current weight. With this being said, please believe me when I tell you that I understand the mechanism, I understand the urge, I understand the desires, because I know them too. I’m an insider on this problem, I’m not one of those people who like to judge the others without knowing their struggles.
I want to use my knowledge to help others with similar issues. This is what I know.
Table of Contents
First, understand what you’re actually dealing with
Emotional eating (and eating disorders in general) isn’t about hunger. I’ve come to understand that a whole lot of stuff happens in our minds (not the correct technical words a therapist would use, but then again, I’m not a therapist), and not all of that stuff is completely clear to me.
Despite the hardships of our struggles, eating can’t just stop being part of our lives. Resisting can be difficult, but there’s one thing we know for sure: if the hunger we feel is in our stomachs, or in our heads. Don’t lie to yourself, you know where this comes from. Emotional hunger is more like a thought than a sensation. I want something. I should eat something. I deserve something.
I struggle a lot when my brain starts rationalizing, it wants to justify why I should eat something. I ate less than usual yesterday, so tonight I’ve earned more. That lunch wasn’t satisfying, so I need something extra. Of course this is nonsense, but sometimes this voice inside me is very convincing. What follows is a mental argument that continues until the next scheduled meal, when actual eating solves the problem legitimately.
But what triggers it? Here’s what surprised me: stress, loneliness, boredom — those are real and tangible causes of emotional eating, but it’s not all. I also feel the pull when things go well. When something good happens, when I’m in a positive mood, I get an impulse to celebrate with food. Sometimes this is even harder than resisting a negative emotion, because I don’t feel like I’m in a fight with my own mind that I must win. It’s as if everything was ok, so I can eat.
A self-feeding cycle of wrong habits
If you’re subject to emotional eating, you most likely know about the guilt cycle — you eat, you feel guilty, the guilt triggers more eating. That’s real, I’ve experienced it and so have you, but I want to be more specific.
When I give in to emotional eating one day, the desire the next day is stronger. Am I actually hungrier the following day? Of course not, but I’ve reinforced a pattern. My brain thinks this is something that happens, a logic and expected outcome, and it starts anticipating it. I’ll likely be hungry at an even earlier time. I’ve given this message to my brain for all my life, right now it’s probably engraved in my mind the same way talking and walking are.
That’s why I say that the battle doesn’t end with a victory. It doesn’t end at all. It pauses when there’s nothing left to fight about because the next proper meal has come and eating makes my hunger go away. It will come back, but I outlasted my desires for one more day, that’s the closest thing to a victory I can get.
The hardest time for me is the afternoon. Yours might be different — evenings, late nights, whenever your defenses are lowest. Identify your window, because that’s where you have to work.
Your weapons to make it easier
If I thought this fight was meaningless I wouldn’t be writing this article (the whole blog wouldn’t even exist, most likely). There is something we can do to make the whole situation easier for us. Bear in mind: just easier, never easy.
Let’s start with the basics: since we can’t stop eating, we have to decide what we can eat and what we can’t. Everybody, even the people with no eating disorder, should learn what their body needs and how to balance a diet, and I’ve only done it in the most recent times, when I upped my physical activity so much that my muscles are in constant need of correct feeding. This is the step zero, the prerequisite for everything. It only gets easier once you know what you’re supposed to eat.
Step one: cooking, or meal prepping, if you want to get fancy. Jokes aside, this is also a very important skill that every adult should have and I’ve acquired it way too late in life (I’m still not great, but at least I can survive on my own and even enjoy learning something new every now and then). I cook everything I can in advance, usually the day before I plan to eat it. Of course, some things are better off cooked at the moment of eating, but the rest is free game to cook in advance and put in the fridge. When you do it, you are helping your future self to eat with low effort and stick to the plan. You’re making it easier for him. You’ll thank yourself for that.
Step two: if it’s not in your house, you can’t eat it. If you have a snacking problem, don’t buy snacks when you’re shopping for groceries. I know I definitely have it, if I have chips in my house I’ll eat them, there’s no way I can resist them for long, so I must not buy them. This sounds insultingly simple, but it’s also very effective. You’ll save money, health and guilt, making it easier for yourself.
Step three: delete delivery apps. We live in a time where you can have your worst food decisions arrive at your door without the need for you to go get them. Remove that option, it’s doing nothing good for your health and your mind. Make resisting easier.
My personal switch
I wrote about this elsewhere, but it’s also relevant here. A few months ago I came home from a nice weekend away, felt the familiar drop of Sunday evening, and ate badly. Standard pattern.
But when I finished, instead of feeling guilt, I asked myself a question: what did that give me?
Was it satisfying? Did it make the weekend last longer? Did it make Monday feel better?
The answer was a big fat no. The food might have been slightly tasty, but nothing indispensable. And something about that changed how I experience the desire. It didn’t eliminate it, but it made it clear to me that the desire was useless. It has no authority on me, I don’t answer to it. I answer to my willpower, to my discipline, and nothing else. And remember, so do you.
I haven’t eaten badly alone at home since that evening. The desire hasn’t gone anywhere, but now I’m stronger.
Don’t underestimate the power of your mind
Most articles about emotional eating focus on identifying your triggers and replacing food with alternative behaviors, like going for a walk, or calling a friend, or drinking water. This isn’t wrong advice, but it’s incomplete.
The mental component is consistently undersold. Emotional eating lives in your head, so I believe the response has to start in your head too. Keeping your mind occupied is going to be crucial: be it with a sport, a hobby, volunteering, whatever floats your boat. Just don’t let it idle, because an idle mind has the bandwidth to think about food, which you don’t want. I want my mind to think about my life, not what I’ll eat next. Food is only the fuel to build what I really want.
And if you can access a good therapist, do it. They cannot Thanos-snap your problem out of existence, but they can help you understand the mechanisms behind you particular case. If you find out how it works, you can discover how to fight it better. I know this from experience.
A comforting summary
I want you to remember that it doesn’t get easy. It just gets easier.
This might be disappointing, but a time will come when your desires will not condition you entire life anymore. Fighting these urges is not different than training your body: when you lift weights, your muscles get bigger and stronger. Stronger muscles will help you lift a certain weight with ease, even if the weight is still the same. The only difference is that the struggle against emotional eating does not train your body, it trains your mind. That’s the reason I say that it gets easier, never easy: the challenge is still the same, just like 80 kilos will keep being 80 kilos, but if you’re used to resisting it (or if you’re used to bench pressing 100 kilos) then it will feel easier.
Don’t wait for the day when it feels easy. It won’t come. Build the strength instead, one afternoon at a time, and trust that the cumulative effect is real even when you can’t feel it.
If you slip, you slip. The cycle only continues if you let the slip become the new baseline. One bad evening doesn’t undo months of work. The next meal is always a fresh start. Remember: it’s only a failure if you quit. Just don’t do it, for your future self who deserves it.