In honor of Emotional Overeating Awareness Month, the challenge for the month of April is to feel those uncomfortable feelings without using food as a coping mechanism. If you overeat when feeling stressed and/or upset, ask yourself these questions:
Do I try to fill a void with food?
Does the food fill the ache?
Does food do what I want it to do?
Eating is a mood-altering experience which stimulates brief feelings of euphoria and happiness. Research has proven that food consumption, similar to alcohol or drug consumption, stimulates the release of neurotransmitters. The euphoric producing neurotransmitter dopamine floods the brain when eating refined and processed carbohydrates. Once this pattern of overindulging is established, you experience compulsive urges to stimulate the pleasure center of the brain through food. This patterned response to emotional distress is a significant component of obesity.
Emotional eating suggests that you use food to cope with your unpleasant emotions and problems. Eating for comfort may temporarily soothe or numb your feelings. However, the aftermath of emotional overeating is generally associated with feelings of remorse, pain, disgust, anger, and guilt. There are many reasons that people overeat such as boredom, replacing love, stuffing, grief, depression, or anxiety. This patterned behavior creates a destructive habit of avoiding the underlying problem at hand. Remember, you live the way you eat!
To effectively change this pattern, you must first identify your triggers.
When do you tend to overeat?
What are you feeling?
What lead up to the binge?
What time of day is it?
After the trigger and emotions have been pinned down, replace the urge to overeat with a new activity. Take your dog for a walk, call a friend, exercise, or go for a drive. Distract yourself from the urge to overeat. Accept that food may temporarily comfort you, but only temporarily. If you avoid giving in to your urge, you will feel empowered and in control. Changes, no matter how small, bring you closer to your goal of overall health.
If you have the tendency to emotionally eat, memorize this phrase:
DON’T comfort myself with food
If I’m upset, don’t eat to seek comfort!
It won’t solve the problem and
I’ll just feel worse.
No matter how you categorize your unhealthy relationship with food (friendships, substance use, shopping, etc.), destructive habits require lifestyle modifications to sustain changes long-term. Our thoughts shape our mood; therefore thoughts effect our behaviors and choices. This is wonderful news because we have a choice in how we feel! The realization that you are mostly responsible for how you feel is empowering. When we take responsibility for our own life, the choices we make, and our life experiences we make conscious decisions about how to respond rather than react to problems. Positive thinking produces a positive mood thereby decreasing the likelihood of emotional eating.Make a commitment to get back into the driver’s seat of your life and health. Who is driving the bus… you or your emotions? Begin taking small steps to modify your lifestyle in order to improve overall health and wellbeing. Don’t find yourself being “emotionally mugged” by overeating. Weight loss surgery and dieting change your relationship with your body. This does NOT change your relationship with food or your internal struggle to maintain weight loss. You will have the same brain in a different body. Surgery will not make you whole or fill the voids in your life. You must work through your feelings and past experiences in bite-sized pieces. This is by no means an easy process. Contemplate this – how much do I want my wholeness? Do I want to find peace and contentment in my relationship with food? If you are determined to find contentment and wholeness in yourself rather than food, it’s time to make thinking and lifestyle modifications to create lasting change. The REAL work begins AFTER surgery!
If you are at your wit’s end and continue to experience difficulty controlling your impulses to emotionally indulge, call our office to schedule a therapy session so we can work together to find solutions to these frustrating obstacles. Don’t be hesitant to let staff know how we can collaborate to improve your success with weight loss surgery.

