Emotional eating
Emotional eating means eating in response to feelings rather than hunger – for comfort, or to cope with stress or boredom. It's human, and it can change.
Ausführlich erklärt
Emotional eating means eating to regulate a feeling – not because your body needs energy. The cake after an argument, the crisps when you're bored, the ice cream as a reward after a tough day. Almost everyone knows the feeling, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. Sweet and fatty foods appeal to the brain's reward system and feel comforting in the moment. The catch: in a US study, people's mood after a sad film didn't improve any faster with comfort food than with other food or with no food at all – time did the real work. And often the feeling comes back, sometimes along with guilt.
The first step is to tell the two kinds of hunger apart. Physical hunger builds slowly, is felt in your stomach, is open to different foods and ends when you're full. Emotional hunger usually comes on suddenly, sits more in your head, craves something specific and often doesn't stop even when your stomach is full. One simple question helps: “Would I eat an apple right now?” If the answer is no, it's usually not hunger.
The second step is to name the feeling instead of eating it away. Tired, lonely, stressed, bored, sad? Every feeling has a better remedy than food: a walk, a phone call, a warm bath, ten minutes of music. This won't happen overnight – a food diary with a column for your mood will show you the patterns after two weeks.
Important for families: food should be neither comfort nor reward nor punishment. “If you're good, you'll get ice cream” teaches children to link feelings with food. Comfort with affection, reward with time together. If emotional eating regularly ends in binge-eating episodes with a loss of control, talk to your GP or use the anonymous telephone advice service of the German Federal Institute for Public Health (BIÖG, formerly BZgA) on 0221 892031 – asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness.