Are You an Emotional Eater?

If you find yourself craving foods even when you are not hungry you might be an emotional eater. An emotional eater is someone who eats to suppress or soothe her emotions. However, most emotional eaters are not aware that they are doing this. They only know that they crave certain foods or can't stop eating until they are so full they feel sick.

It is unfortunate when people are not aware that they are an emotional eaters because instead of finding out what is causing the overeating they start fad diets to lose weight and then they feel very bad about themselves for not being able to stick to them. Their self-esteem suffers for not controlling their food intake and the worse thing that happens is that they go up and down in weight, called yo-yo dieting, which is even worse for their health than being a few pounds overweight.

Below are the reasons that people overeat or consume in excess foods that are not good for them in order to soothe, suppress, or avoid an emotion.

• Anger. Most people, especially women, were taught that anger was wrong, therefore even when they have the right to be angry they supress it and some use food to do it.
• Anxiety/Worry/Fear. People who are chronically afraid, anxious or worryworts have a high tendency to addictive behaviors in order to soothe their feelings. Some become alcoholics, drug users, smokers, and even the culturally accepted and encouraged workaholics. And others turn to food.
• Stress. Regular stress can induce overeating, eating wrong foods or both. Not just because you are too stressed out to think about what you are eating or how much you are eating, but also to help calm yourself down.
• Life Changes. Life is change, there is no other way. However, most people were not taught how to handle regular change. Much less are we taught how to handle tragedies, job loss, traumas, illnesses and death of a loved one. There are a mixture of feelings that emerge when change occurs and some people who have not learned to understand their emotions use food to comfort themselves or cope. Even when good changes occur such as a new lover, a wedding, having a baby, buying a house, getting a promotion, starting a business,etc., occurs people turn to food for comfort. Part of the reason is that it is much easier to just eat than to sort out how you are feeling about the change that is happening. Plus some people rather not let themselves feel what they are feeling because they are afraid of their emotions.
• Boredom. Instead of finding ways to engage themselves in activities that will be fun and stimulating, people turn to food to pass the time.
• Lack of love or meaningful relationships. These people can't stand feeling alone and use food as a replacement for love. It could be they are alone because they are shy. Also it could be because they are afraid of emotional intimacy so they isolate themselves. Whatever the reason, when they feel alone they eat which makes them feel worse so they isolate themselves even more and therefore make less friendships and repel lovers.
• Feel the need for protection. Some women who have had negative experiences with men eat to gain extra weight and keep men away from them. This is the only way they know how to protect themselves. Although most women do not do this consciously. A clue that you might be using food for protection is that once you loose some weight and start getting attention from men again, you sabotage your weight loss success by overeating to get back to your comfort weight. Also some people over eat because they have not learned to protect themselves from negative or abusive people and energy drainers so they pad on some weight, subconsiously thinking that will do it.
• Feel other people's negative emotions. This is very similar to the needing protection point above. However, this one is specifically for empaths. An empath is a person who is very sensitive to the emotions of others. They just don't have compassion for others, they actually feel their pain and some even take on their pain. Empaths are often overweight because they also subconsciously eat to give themselves extra padding between themselves and other people, but also because feeling the emotions of the negative people around them can be so overwhelming they use food to soothe and relax them. A clue that you are an empath and use food to alleviate the symptoms is that when you are surrounded by people for a while, you start craving foods even though you are not hungry and can't stop eating that food once you start.
• A caretaker who has no time for her own needs. Many caretakers feel overwhelmed when taking care of others and rarely have time for their own self-care. In order to gratify their needs, caretakers sometimes reach for food. They don't recognize that what they need instead is some sleep, rest, exercise, time with friends, or just doing something she enjoys doing away from children and other people she takes care of.
• Low Self-Esteem. You would think that in order to improve self-esteem issues the first part of the plan would be to improve your appearance as best you could. But actually this backfires. Mostly because people do not compare themselves to realistic ideals. Instead we compare ourselves to women we see in the magazines, movies, TV, etc. Dieting for people with low-self esteem is very damaging because when they can not always control every morsel they eat, they are extrememely hard on themselves and end up developing eating disorders such as bulimia, binges, anorexia, and compulsive eating. And what makes it worse for people with low-self-esteem is that they sometimes unconsiously reach for food to soothe their insecurities. Then they get angry that they sabotaged themselves. This is a big reason why they develop the eating disorders and then have a hard time healing from them. It is a never ending vicious cycle.
• No reason for living- Not knowing your life purpose. We all desire to feel needed or that our life has a purpose. Some people do not know what their life purpose/calling is and in order to fill the void they use food instead of spending the time to discover what their reason for being is.
• Depression. I have true compassion for those who sufffer from depression. I will be writing more in future a post about this, but for now work on catching yourself when you are using food to help you cope when you are feeling down. When you remember go for a walk instead. I assure you that once you are done with your walk you will feel better.