Who doesn’t like comfort food? When I think of comfort food, it conjures up wonderfully flavorful images of mac and cheese, lasagna, chocolate cake, and ice-cold sodas. Many people often turn to these homey childhood favorites when they’re craving a familiar flavor during a challenging or chaotic time. Clearly, food can be closely tied to emotions, but for some people this link becomes unhealthy. It’s known as emotional eating, and it can lead to weight gain, an unhealthy relationship with food, and even eating disorders.

Recognize emotional eating

Emotional eating is when a person turns to food to calm or avoid negative feelings such as loneliness, stress, boredom, and sadness. Experts say that approximately 75% of overeating can have an emotional component. Most of my patients have used food to improve their mood at one time or another. It’s understandable to eat ice cream while watching TV alone or grab a candy bar after a stressful work meeting.

Most people don’t even realize that they are using food as a stimulant. However, when this type of eating becomes habitual, you may be setting yourself up for unhealthy consequences, such as weight gain.

How do you recognize emotional eating versus just indulging occasionally?

Think about the last time you reached for your favorite comfort food. Are you hungry? If not, her emotions were dictating her behavior. Emotional eating tends to cause feelings of guilt or regret, which leads to eating more. Responding to genuine hunger doesn’t make you feel bad. Emotional eaters also tend to continue eating even after feeling full. Also, if you’re hungry, you’ll likely feel satisfied with a variety of foods. Most emotional eaters suddenly find themselves craving a particular thing (chocolate, cookies, salty chips, for example) and won’t be satisfied until they eat that item.

Many people go years before recognizing the destructive pattern of emotional eating. Often, they will try a variety of weight loss plans without success because all the diets in the world won’t break an emotional attachment to food. If this sounds like you, rest assured, you can change your behavior and stop gaining weight for good.

How to break the emotional eating cycle

The fastest way to stop emotional eating is to recognize genuine hunger. Many people fear going hungry, but a rumbling stomach is not the end of the world. You are unlikely to starve if you allow yourself to be hungry.

Try this: Instead of eating until you feel full, eat until you’re three-quarters full. You must be satisfied but comfortable. Then, don’t eat again until you’re really hungry (usually 4-5 hours). This exercise will help you recognize your own physical feeling of hunger. Emotional eaters tend to eat so often that they can’t remember what hunger feels like.

To get to the root of emotional eating, keep a food journal for two weeks. You should not only record each bite you take, but also write down why you are eating and how you feel before and after.

For example, “I had a turkey sandwich on whole wheat because it was my lunch hour and I was hungry. Afterward, I only felt half full, so I ate an apple and felt satisfied and calm.” If things aren’t going so well, it’s important to write it down in your food journal. For example, “I ate a Snickers bar at 3:30. I was still full from lunch, but I was stressed because the sales report is due tomorrow and I have to work late.”

Look back after the two weeks and identify any patterns. Maybe you tend to snack on sweets in the afternoon when all the stress of the workday starts to build up. You may find that you are most vulnerable late at night, after the children are in bed. If you know the situations that lead to emotional eating, you can come up with solutions to make them more manageable.

If emotional eating has led to weight gain, don’t be too hard on yourself. Address the negative emotions and situations that led you to turn to food in the first place. Keeping a food diary and listening to your hunger cues has been a great help to my patients who struggle with this problem. When you start making food choices based on hunger, not emotions, chances are you’ll lose weight naturally. This will lead you to make healthier food choices on a regular basis. Remember that it is possible for anyone to recover from emotional eating and reach a healthy and happy weight.

Mark Rosenberg, MD

Institute for Healthy Aging