3 Reasons Why Emotional Eating Feels Like Binge Eating
Emotional eating is a perfectly healthy coping mechanism and should not feel like binge eating. However, for many of us, we can’t seem to manage it in a way that feels good! If emotional eating doesn’t actually feel good, what’s the point?? So if emotional eating doesn’t “work” for you, let’s talk about a few reasons why:
You’re still restricting food
If you’re restricting food throughout the day and/or holding onto food rules, emotional eating might not be the comforting, nourishing experience you’re expecting. Most likely, when you finally allow yourself to “let go,” you’ll experience feeling out of control. This is because your body has been in scarcity mode and doesn’t trust you to give it the consistent nourishment it needs, so your biological response to restriction takes over. This is not a lack of willpower, but a result of not giving yourself unconditional permission to eat (read more about that here).
You associate food with guilt
Emotional eating is a wonderful coping mechanism. Eating is an emotional experience, and food can elicit positive emotions. All good things! Unfortunately, emotional eating is so demonized in our society, that eating for any other reason than physical need is seen as something to feel bad about. However, we eat for far more reasons than to just satisfy physical hunger. We eat for pleasure, community, culture, and so much more. When you make yourself feel guilty for emotional eating, that completely defeats the purpose, and you’re left feeling bad about yourself, instead of satisfied and calm.
It’s your only coping mechanism
While numbing out or soothing ourselves with food can be exactly what we need, when we rely on it as our only source of comfort, that can start to not feel so great. It can start to cause wear and tear on your relationship with food. It’s important to have other coping mechanisms, or as I call them, tools in your toolbox so you can work through your emotions in a variety of ways! To build your emotion coping toolkit, you’ll want a mix of active and passive coping mechanisms. Active coping mechanisms actually help you process your emotions, while passive ones can be helpful distractions for when you’re not quite ready to process. Emotional eating would be an example of a passive coping mechanism!
Eating for pleasure and comfort is natural. Remove the label “emotional eater” from yourself, because we are all emotional eaters!