Are Emotional Eating & Healthy Diets Mutually Exclusive?
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Photo by Ethan Sexton on Unsplash
In our culture, reaching for your comfort food when you’re stressed — and then complaining that you've eaten too much afterward — is not uncommon. In fact, APA’s Stress In America Survey determines that at least a third of Americans are taking out their feelings on “overeating” or binge eating. Moreover, experts have zeroed in on less nutritionally dense food and alcohol as the common comfort cravings of most Americans, raising the question: Can emotional eating and a healthy lifestyle coincide?
There's something to be said about our dichotomy of good food versus bad food — a mentality that can be harmful and, ironically, drive us towards unsupportive behaviors.
Does emotional eating actually work?
Let’s face it, burying yourself in food when you’re stressed can be truly consoling even on the worst of days. But, how does it work? Professors from the University of California have found the relationship of comfort food with stress — in rodents, no less. The researchers found that when you provide rodents with comfort food and you make them go through stressful situations, the comfort food can affect how their brains respond to stress and eventually reduces their stress hormones. They’ve cross-tested their rodent findings on human respondents and discovered that it works the same way. Furthermore, participants who’ve had long-term exposure to stress and subsequently responded by consuming more calories can actually slow down their production of cortisol — also known as the primary stress hormone.
To add, University of Cincinnati researchers have observed that food products with high sugar content can halt the body’s production of glucocorticoid, another stress hormone. Glucocorticoids have a direct relationship with obesity and immunodeficiency, so there's a slight health benefit to indulging yourself with some sweet snacks. But just a reminder, over consuming sugar-rich foods can still increase your risk for heart disease and diabetes, so it's important to think about your point of diminishing returns when eating.
By now, the supporting studies have proven that emotional eating actually does its job and takes out the stress in our daily lives. However, how can you actually maintain healthy eating habits while not giving up stress eating?
Adopting healthier eating habits
First of all, it will do you well to change your perspective on consuming food. Instead of strictly categorizing food between what's healthy and what isn't, imagine all food as items that have energy, nutrients, and compounds that can sustain you. Feel free to consume whatever food you desire, as long as it makes you feel good and it meets your body's needs. This way, you don't deprive yourself the pleasure that comes from eating.
Secondly, you can also alleviate your anxiety and stress by making a few adjustments to what you eat. My post “Easing Anxiety With Nutrition” details how you can improve your mood by making mindful changes to your diet, such as drinking more water, eating antioxidant-rich foods, and consuming probiotics for gut health.
Lastly, and more importantly, you have to find other ways to truly accommodate your emotional needs. Once you identify that you're feeling stressed or emotional, maybe you can release it by sweating it out in a yoga sesh or investing time into hobbies like tending to ornamental plants. But if you find yourself being so overwhelmed with stress that you can’t seem to get on your yoga mat or in your garden, then it’s best to start by trying out some tried-and-tested breathing techniques that can help lessen anxiety first. Pain Free Working highlights how these can release tension and improve your mood, helping you realign and find your center. One example of a breathing technique is the 4-7-8 method, which involves standing straight, inhaling through your nose for 4 seconds, holding it for 7 seconds, and then forcefully exhaling it for 8 seconds.
To sum it up, it’s totally possible to marry emotional eating and healthy food habits. But, in order to do this, you must first learn to recognize the situations that trigger your emotional eating. This way, you can think of different ways to relieve your emotional stress before your cravings hit. For example, if you find yourself craving a bag of sweets when you're not hungry, think about the emotions behind the craving. Perhaps you're overwhelmed with work, and the better first step would be to delegate tasks better or even take a break to organize your thoughts. The more mindful we are of our body and eating habits, the better we can honor ourselves and meet our needs in healthy ways.
Written by Hazel Riggs
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