3 Ways Your Emotions Affect Eating Habits

As an emotional eating expert (and former emotional eater), I can tell you that your eating habits are NOT a reflection of you as a person. They don’t mean anything negative about you.

If you have “bad” eating habits, it’s only because you have a normal human brain AND normal human emotions.

Sometimes though, your human emotions lead to eating behaviors and eating habits that you’d rather not have. Sometimes your emotions lead to eating behaviors and habits you love.

In this post, I’m sharing 3 ways your emotions affect eating habits, so you can understand more about why you have certain eating habits, particularly emotional eating. The good news is, some emotions actually lead to healthy eating habits.

Desire, Dopamine, and Food

So you know when you see a cookie or a bag of chips and all of a sudden you feel ravenous? That’s desire.

Desire is an emotion. It’s something you feel in your body and then your brain interprets that feeling and makes the suggestion to you to eat the cookie or chips.

Desire can also come up as a craving or urge. (All similar, but some differences). So, when you get that craving at night for a specific snack, remember that it’s an emotion you’re feeling.

What happens with desire, cravings, and urges is that when you eat the food you desired or craved, you get a release of dopamine. This is known commonly as the “pleasure hormone,” because that’s what it feels like, but it’s actually more accurately the “reward” hormone.

Researchers also found that it spikes with anticipation of a reward as well. So, just thinking about the cookie or glass of wine you’ll have after work can cause a little spike in dopamine.

By the way, food has always been linked to reward. Therefore, it only makes sense you’d start desiring food in anticipation of the reward.

This is because back in the day when our species needed to hunt and gather food to survive, the food was the reward, which activated the reward pathway in the brain. This caused a bit of “pleasure,” which acted as motivation to continue the efforts to hunt and gather food.

*If you’d like to read some literature on this, check this one out: Dopaminergic Control of the Feeding Circuit

So now in modern day, once your brain starts connecting a particular food (especially if done at the same time, place, or situation) with the reward of the dopamine spike, a habit starts to form.

Hence, desire and dopamine form a strong bond. But luckily, that bond can be broken.

• LISTEN OR READ: Breaking Your Sugar Habit (Podcast Episode)
• LISTEN OR READ: Food Craving vs. True Hunger (Podcast Episode)

Uncomfortable Emotions and Emotional Eating

You probably figured that uncomfortable emotions would come up as one of the 3 ways your emotions affects eating habits…think emotional eating.

Because you’re a human being, you’re going to experience uncomfortable emotions. These are often “negative” emotions, such as stress, boredom, worry, irritation, sadness. For some people, “positive” emotions are uncomfortable.

Stress and boredom are common ones I see amongst my career women clients. Stress causing stress eating mainly at work. Boredom at night when relaxing, causing night-time snacking or boredom eating.

Food is an easy and quick way to “escape” or “buffer” the uncomfortable emotion. Our human brains LOVE easy and quick.

Food is usually readily available, is sometimes in plain sight, and very easy to physically do as long as you have a hand and a mouth.

Tasty food especially will provide that release of dopamine, that bit of pleasure. Eating also serves as an activity, which can help with the “escape.”

It’s all only temporary though. Short-term gains for long-term pains.

So, if you find yourself emotionally eating, it’s often from negative emotions.

Not because there’s something “wrong” with you, or because you “lack control” of yourself. It’s just because of your normal human brain and your normal human emotions.

• LISTEN OR READ: The 2 Biggest Emotional Eating Mistakes (Podcast Episode)
• LISTEN OR READ: Are You Using Food as an Escape? (Podcast Episode)

Emotions Stemming from Love

I saved the good one for last…..there are positive ways your emotions affect eating habits.

Most (if not all) of our emotions either stem from love or fear. Fear-based emotions are those negative emotions like stress, worry, anger.

There are also many emotions that stem from love. Examples of these are motivation, confidence, compassion, dedication and kindness.

When you feel emotions stemming from love, these affect your eating habits in a really great way. When you are feeling a love-based emotion, your actions tend are more positive, productive and future-focused.

You end up making healthier choices, thinking about your body and health. You also tend to make choices based on longer-term, rather than instant gratification. This of course leads to healthier eating habits.

So notice when you’re feeling those love-based feelings and use those to fuel your food choices. Take advantage every opportunity you can.

*And just a note, feeling a lack of motivation can lead to poor eating habits too. Our brains tend to look for the quickest and easiest food available in this case.

• LISTEN OR READ: Self-Compassion and Your Eating Habits (Podcast Episode)
• LISTEN OR READ: My Emotional Eating Habit (Podcast Episode)

I’ll Leave You With This…

Emotions fuel our eating behaviors and when this sequence occurs over and over, it becomes an eating habit. There are other things that help certain eating behaviors to become a habit, but the good news is that all of it is “treatable.”

You’ll always experience emotions as a human, but learning how to experience an emotion without acting upon it (this is just a skill you can develop), will break any emotional eating habit.

This is one of the many ways I help my clients transform their eating habits. If you’re curious about what would help you, I’d love to chat during a free consultation.

Think of it like a “diagnostic and treatment plan.” You’ll get clarity as to why what you’ve been doing isn’t working, relief that there are very doable solutions and that this is “treatable,” and feel encouraged and maybe even excited.

Don’t delay your health and happiness any longer — Book your free consultation here.