Emotional Eating

We can all have a day when we’ve just had enough and we reach for our favourite food that gives us a feeling of comfort – chocolate, ice cream, crisps. Whatever your food off choice, you have set up a cognitive, emotional and behavioural habit.

Your trigger will come from the way you interpret something that is happening in your life. It may be a situation at work, something a loved one has said to you, or a negative thought you have about yourself.

This causes you to have an emotion, which swells and grows inside of you. Depending on the way you have learnt to feel, express and deal with emotions will determine what you do next. If you bottle up the emotion inside, you may have learnt that eating food has the effect of cutting off the emotion you are feeling – result!

However, the period of calm you feel after eating is soon replaced with different thoughts and feelings where you tell yourself that you are weak and you feel fat. This can in itself be another trigger for you to eat again.

Everyone has the capacity to indulge in Emotional Eating. You may feel that it is happening too often, and you may be aware that you are putting on weight and feel that your eating is getting out of control.

Treatment

Our Eating Therapists will help you recognise what triggers cause you to feel emotions that are difficult for you. We will explore the beliefs, thoughts and assumptions you have about yourself that determine the way you interpret things in your life.

We will help you create new ways of thinking about life events that will lead you to deal with things in new ways that do not involve food.

We will help you recognise the feelings you are experiencing, give you new tools to help you feel and express them in a safe way, so that you feel in control. We will also teach you new communication skills so that you can tell people how you feel when something is happening.

Emotional Eating can be a precursor to developing more serious disordered eating patterns. Call us today on 020 7499 8922 and we will give you the support you need to make your eating habits healthier.