What Causes Emotional Eating?

Tiredness, Tension, Stress, Anger, Low Energy Trigger Food Cravings

Sep 23, 2009

Why does emotional eating temporarily cause feelings of comfort and increased energy? Coping with stress and fatigue with food cravings can lead to poor eating habits.

Eating in response to cravings and to satisfy feelings and moods and not due to hunger is emotional eating. As stress levels and negative pressures increase, eating to boost energy or fulfill the desire for comfort, is a temporary antidote.

Eating to feed feelings also has a cyclical feedback loop and can lead to more negative feelings, such as guilt and low self-esteem.

Emotional Eating Causes Weight Gain and Obesity

In emotional eating, food is a reliable but short lived mood elevator. Feelings of stress and sadness also cause more lethargy and activities such as watching television for distraction. This causes further overeating and craving unhealthy foods.

Food habits are driven by psychological factors and getting to the underlying cause of food cravings is important in successfully maintaining weight loss and healthy eating habits.

Getting to the underlying cause of food cravings is important to maintain weight loss and health. A study published in the International Journal Of Eating Disorders (Volume 18;79-90) presents evidence that a high proportion of the obesity epidemic of developed nations is caused by emotional eating.

This study also shows that the emotions or moods that lead to overeating and binging on unhealthy foods include anger, anxiety, boredom, hopelessness and loneliness as well as feelings of fatigue and tiredness. Negative moods low energy, listlessness and increased tension.

Coping with stress and tension by eating certain foods allows the self-regulation of these negative feelings. Individual differences play a role in emotional eating and weight gain is also dependent on other lifestyle factors and inherited body type. Positive moods such as contentment and joy can also cause overeating such as occurs during a wedding celebration or having dinner with good social company. But these feelings do not cause chronic overeating or develop into long term poor eating habits.

The Difference Between Cravings and Hunger

Tiredness, Tension and Low Energy Cause Emotional Eating

In negative feelings, food temporarily alters mood and increases energy. This causes poor eating habits to develop over time, which causes a conditioning to turn to food in response to feelings of tension and low energy by eating energy generating foods. For this reason, cravings are usually for energy intensive foods that contain sugar or fats. These good tasting foods metabolize and raise blood sugar levels quickly, giving a short burst of energy which counteracts tiredness. The term 'sugar rush' describes this well.

Low energy and fatigue can result from stress, feelings of sadness and despair, lack of restful sleep, lack of exercise and depression. Negative moods, tension and low energy lead to emotional eating because they are uncomfortable feelings. This discomfort is temporarily resolved by eating and leads to immediately feeling better though this is short-lived and followed by guilt and more negative feelings.

The more emotional eating is succumbed to escape bad moods and feelings, the more it is required for feelings of betterment. Once established, habits drive behavior and can overwhelm resolve.

Other habit forming behaviour and addictions such as drinking and gambling also tend to suppress negative emotions, however food cravings are much more common as it is readily available and acceptable, and it is natural to think about eating when low in energy or feeling upset. The media, advertisements and store displays are also designed to trigger emotional eating and bad food habits gradually control consciousness.

The copyright of the article What Causes Emotional Eating? in Mind/Body Fitness is owned by Noreen Kassem. Permission to republish What Causes Emotional Eating? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.