Emotional Eating

From LoveToKnow Diet

Emotional eating is one of the most misunderstood eating disorders (although not an official medical diagnosis) disrupting lives. It can cause devastation to a myriad of people who are trapped in its vicious cycle. The good news is that there is hope.

What Is Emotional Eating?

People who suffer from the effects of emotionally triggered eating are generally binge-eaters whose minds drive them to food in order to mask their real feelings. Emotional eaters will eat normally and may not look as if they are overweight -- until the emotions threaten to reveal themselves. When that happens, emotional eaters are driven to eat enormous quantities of food. Even though they struggle with the desires, these people are victims of a short-circuit in their coping mechanisms making it impossible to resist the drive to eat themselves into oblivion.

What Causes It?

Many causes are known to trigger individual binges, but almost all emotional eating can be traced to some trauma that a person was not able to effectively cope with at the time it occurred. The person finds comfort in food, and the brain registers the sedation of the emotional pain, creating the beginnings of a pattern. With subsequent emotional overloads, the pattern is reinforced, until the person subconsciously turns to food at the first sign of emotional distress. Primary causes are often childhood abuse, sometimes physical, sometimes sexual.

What Treatments Are Available?

Individual psychotherapy is crucial in the treatment of emotional eating. The patient must be gently led through traumatic events from the past and helped to face and accept the pain that was inflicted. A good account of one such course of therapy is documented in Nancy Goodman's book It Was Food vs. Me ... and I Won. This book can also be helpful to those who think they may suffer from this problem, as it can supplement their therapy with support and affirmation -- someone else has dealt with this difficult problem and conquered it.

Some therapists take a holistic approach; others take a spiritual tack: Silent Hunger, by Arthur W. Halliday, MD, and Judy W. Halliday, RN, is a good example of the spiritual approach.

As an adjunct to the psychotherapy, nutritional education may be helpful. However, most emotional eaters already understand basic nutritional theory and understand how they should eat; they just find themselves helpless to cope with pain in any way other than eating.

How Can I Help an Emotional Eater?

The most important response for an emotional eater is encouragement for them to get therapy, and to avoid saying one of the discouraging phrases like: "Just exercise some self-control," or "Just snap out of it." The emotional eater is helpless in the face of the urge to binge.

One lesson the patient learns in therapy is to accept that binges will happen. Acceptance of coping with pain helps minimize the extent and frequency of a binge. Fighting the binge, or beating oneself up over having binged, is extremely counter-productive. If the friends and loved ones of an emotional eater can restrain themselves from discouraging the binge, while encouraging the person to face and talk about the emotions that are triggering the binge, they will be of tremendous help to the emotional eater who is learning to make new choices in life.