Chapter 4
Emotional Eating Traps
When you hear upsetting news, what is your first instinct? Do you find yourself reaching for sweets?
When you’ve had a bad day at work, do you stop on the way home to hit the drive-through at a fast-food restaurant or pick up a big bag of chips at a convenience store?
After you’ve had an argument with a friend, do you head into the kitchen and tear open the bag of chocolate chips you’d been saving to make cookies?
When you experience negative emotions, you may have strong cravings for food. You may even believe that food is the only way to calm down. Or you may believe that you deserve to comfort yourself with food when you’re upset. Eating becomes your default response to distress. Most people who struggle to lose weight have a habit of turning to food for solace when they feel lonely, worried, angry, or sad.
And in fact, food can comfort, console, distract, and soothe. Eating can calm you down—but only while you are literally consuming the food and for a very short time afterward. Food will never solve the problem that upset you in the first place. While eating may temporarily distract you from difficult feelings, once that distraction has worn off, you are likely to experience regret for straying from your plan—and you will probably feel even worse than you did before you started eating.
Emotional eating never solves problems. It just creates new ones.
You may also turn to food when you experience minor discomfort. Perhaps you’re feeling tired, bored, at loose ends, or you simply want to procrastinate. You may not even be fully aware of how you are feeling but find yourself heading to the kitchen for an unplanned snack.
The way to escape emotional eating traps is to learn how to deal with discomfort in a new way. Instead of turning to food when you experience negative emotions, you can try to solve the problem you’re upset about or adopt a more reasonable view of the problem. But if you are seeing the problem accurately and there’s nothing you can do at the moment to solve it, you need to learn to accept your distress.
Accepting distress is a learning process. A reasonable interim strategy is to focus on something else. You can begin by distracting yourself with pleasurable or productive activities. When you demonstrate to yourself that you can break the habit of managing negative emotions through eating, you will feel stronger and more in control. As you practice and gain mastery over emotional eating, you will probably experience a tremendous sense of pride and relief that food no longer has power over you.
Let’s consider a few of the most common emotional eating traps.
#1: The Trying to Numb Pain Trap
You believe it’s not okay to feel negative emotions.
Elizabeth had struggled with her weight for many years, but it wasn’t until she was in her sixties that she began to have a serious problem. Things really came to a head when her husband, Bill, who was ten years her senior, began to suffer health problems. Every time he got sick, she became anxious and let her eating “get really out of control.”
In fact, whenever Elizabeth felt sad, worried, or frustrated, her immediate response was to think about food: I need to eat something to calm down. And the food she turned to wasn’t of the healthy variety. She ate sweets—lots of them. She believed that experiencing negative emotion was “bad” and that she needed to eat to get rid of her uncomfortable feelings.
First we talked about what might happen if Elizabeth didn’t eat when she was distressed. Elizabeth said she thought she’d feel increasingly upset until she finally couldn’t tolerate the feeling any longer.
I asked Elizabeth to think of recent times when she felt significant distress but didn’t eat. The first experience she told me about had occurred the previous month. She had accompanied Bill to his doctor’s appointment, where they were told he needed an operation. “I was really upset,” she said, “but I couldn’t eat. I wanted to but I didn’t have the opportunity. By the time we left the doctor’s office, it was almost lunchtime. But first we had to go to the lab so he could get some blood work done, which took forever. Then when we finally left, our car had a flat tire and AAA took over an hour to get to us. Then we had to stop at a second pharmacy for Bill’s medicine because the first one was out of what he needed. When we finally got home, it was almost dinnertime.”
“And what had you eaten since you left the doctor’s office?”
“Nothing,” Elizabeth replied.
She had a perfect example of an experience when she was very upset but didn’t eat. She had gotten through it. And how would she have felt if she had had access to junk food and had eaten it all afternoon?
“Bad,” she said. “I mean, I would have excused myself some, but I know it’s unhealthy for me.” She captured that experience on a reminder card so she could remember that she didn’t need to self-medicate with food to get through a trying experience:
I was really upset after the appointment with Dr. Ross, but I got through the whole rest of the afternoon without eating. This shows it’s not true that I need to eat when I’m upset. I may want to eat, but I don’t need to eat.
Next we talked about how emotions aren’t inherently good or bad. Emotions are simply part of our human experience. In fact, negative emotions can serve an important function, alerting us to a problem that may need our attention. To break the cycle of emotional eating, we need to accept all our emotions, not just the positive ones.
To help Elizabeth recognize that intense emotions have peaks and troughs, I asked her to visualize a negative emotion as a big wave in the ocean. Like a wave, emotional pain can build up and become more intense, but it always crests, and then starts to come down, even if you don’t do anything to make it go away. Elizabeth made a reminder card for these ideas:
When I was the most upset I ever remember feeling, I still survived. Negative emotions aren’t bad. They are part of being human. I don’t need to make them go away. Negative emotions always crest, like a wave, and then start to come down. I don’t have to be afraid of my feelings.
Escape the Trying to Numb Pain Trap
Many emotional eating traps share a bit in common with this trap. At its root, this trap is about numbing pain. But if you think back over your history, you will likely find plenty of evidence that you can tolerate negative feelings. You are undoubtedly stronger than you think; you don’t need food to manage upsetting emotions. You just think you do. To develop trust in your ability to handle difficult feelings, you need to stop using food to decrease your distress.
Think about the most distressed you’ve ever been. Call that a ten on a ten-point scale. Then do an experiment. The next time you’re upset, set a timer for twenty minutes. Don’t do anything to try to reduce your negative emotion. Don’t fight it. Just measure it on your ten-point scale. See what happens when you experience negative emotions and just accept feeling that way.
Reflect on past experiences of emotional distress when you weren’t able to turn to food to feel better. How intense did the distress get? How long did it last at that peak level? Did it continue to go up and up until a catastrophe happened? Or did it rise, crest, and fall; then rise, crest, and fall again?
#2: The No Alternatives Trap
You believe that if you’re upset, the only thing you can do is eat.
As Elizabeth’s husband continued to experience health problems, developing alternative coping skills became increasingly important. Now that she knew negative emotions weren’t harmful, we were able to talk about strategies that would be healthier and more helpful than turning to food.
I asked Elizabeth whether she knew other people who didn’t turn to food when they were upset. “Well, yes,” she said. Her husband turned out to be a great example. His eating remained pretty much the same from day to day. When Bill was upset about his medical condition, for example, he didn’t turn to food. Instead, he talked to Elizabeth, took a short walk, or distracted himself by reading.
Elizabeth’s husband was a good role model for coping with negative emotion. “I guess I’ve just always used food as a coping strategy,” she told me. “When I was a kid, my grandmother used to give me cookies whenever my older brother was really mean to me,” she said. “I think ever since then I’ve associated feeling bad with eating.”
Even if you have had a long history of calming yourself with food, it doesn’t mean you can’t change. Eating to soothe upsetting emotions is a learned behavior that you can unlearn. Elizabeth made a reminder card to help her remember this idea:
I learned to eat when I was feeling bad, but now I can unlearn it. Bill doesn’t eat when he’s upset. It’s not a given that food is the only way to feel better.
The following week, Elizabeth asked a couple of close friends and her sister what they did when they were upset. She was full of interesting information at our next session.
“It was really an eye-opener,” Elizabeth said, as she pulled out her notes. “My sister said she tries to solve the problem, and if she can’t, she focuses on getting things done around the house. My neighbor Isabella just tries to distract herself. My friend Tracy does deep breathing and meditation or yoga.”
I asked Elizabeth to consider which of these strategies might work for her. “I guess I eat when I’m upset to distract myself from the problem, so distractions might help. I usually find it hard to focus on solving a problem when I’m upset, so I think it’s better to try to calm down first.”
Elizabeth and I made a list of distractions she could try the next time she was distressed. Watching television or reading a book hadn’t diverted her attention enough in the past, so we left those off the list. Instead, we tried to think of activities that would be truly absorbing. After some discussion, Elizabeth made the following list.
Distracting Activities
When I’m upset, try one of these distractions. If I still feel the urge to eat, try others until the urge to eat goes away.
1. Call a friend (Alice, Robin, or Neil).
2. Write an e-mail to someone I haven’t connected with in a while (Rob, Jonah).
3. Clean out a drawer in the kitchen.
4. Drink hot tea and watch the birds outside.
5. Listen to classical music.
6. Read the newspaper headlines until I find an article that interests me.
7. Play a word game on the iPad.
8. Accept feeling upset without trying to distract myself.
Just reading through this list seemed to calm Elizabeth. She said she would continue to add to the list as she thought of other distracting activities.
A secondary problem with believing that if you’re upset the only thing you can do is eat occurs after you eat: the inevitable consequences. Elizabeth and I talked about the numerous problems that arise after she uses food to soothe herself. She wrote down the gist of our discussion:
If I eat when I’m upset, I’ll only feel momentary comfort. Then I’ll have 3 problems: the original problem, then feeling bad and out of control, and then gaining weight. When I want to eat for emotional reasons, ask myself whether I want 1 problem or 3 problems.
Escape the No Alternatives Trap
To escape this trap, you will need to test the idea that eating is the only way you can calm down. In actuality, you just have a strong habit of eating when you’re upset. You may continue to rely on food until you develop confidence that you can handle negative emotions. In the meantime, distraction can help you avoid eating.
Think of as many examples as you can of occasions when you felt upset but had no access to food. What did you do? Did you eventually calm down? How accurate is it to say that you have to eat to calm down? Write a reminder card to reinforce the idea that the only way to decrease negative emotion is through food.
Make a list of activities you can engage in instead of eating—for instance, people to call or e-mail, websites to visit, videos to watch, errands to run. There’s also music, meditation, exercise, crafts or hobbies, yard work, housework, a soothing bath or cup of tea—so many possibilities. But don’t wait until you’re in distress to make this list or you’ll likely just end up eating.
For additional ideas, ask a friend. Or enter “pleasurable activities” in a search engine.
Once you have your list, see which activities require advance preparation. Do you need to buy a book of crossword puzzles? Inflate the tires on your bike so you can take a ride? Put any required objects (your scrapbook, magazines) along with a copy of the list in an easily accessible box so everything will be ready and waiting when you’re upset and have the urge to eat.
#3: The Entitlement Eating Trap
You believe you deserve to comfort yourself with food.
Sometimes emotional eating traps take a slightly different form: you may or may not believe that you have to eat to feel better, but you think you are entitled to eat.
Beth, a social worker, took care of many people at work but did not always do a great job of taking care of herself. Many evenings she left work upset, still thinking about a problem one of her clients was facing. Then she’d stop at a fast-food restaurant, get a really big meal at the drive-through, and finish it while she was driving home. Although Beth knew that eating fast food had packed on the pounds, she found she was unable to stop herself; those meals felt nurturing. She had spent all day trying to help others feel better. “Eating feels like what I do to take care of myself, to make me feel better,” she explained.
I questioned whether those fast-food meals actually did make her feel better.
“Well, yes,” she replied. “It’s my treat.” Then she paused. “I do feel better while I’m eating, but . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“But?”
“But I have to admit, I feel bad afterward. I feel overstuffed, weak, . . . and guilty. I know how bad fast food is for me. I’m embarrassed. I would hate it if anyone saw me eating it.”
And what impact did it have on reaching her goal of losing weight?
“Well, it’s making it nearly impossible,” Beth said. “Even if I’ve been really good during the day, fast food has so many calories. I know I can’t keep doing it and lose weight. But I keep thinking, ‘I had such a hard day. Aren’t I entitled to feel better?’”
“Of course you are!” I exclaimed. “But aren’t you also entitled to get all the benefits of losing weight?” She nodded and gave me a half smile. “Then we just need to figure out how you can feel better without eating.” She made a reminder card to remember this idea:
When I want to eat fast food after an upsetting day at work, remember: I’m entitled to take care of myself and I’m entitled to feel better, but I’m also entitled to get everything on my advantages list, so I have to find other ways to comfort myself. (Besides, eating it always makes me feel worse afterward.)
Beth needed strategies to help her get over her fast-food habit. After a bit of discussion, she decided she would spend time on Sundays cooking for the week so she’d have a healthy meal waiting for her at home every night. Then she’d be less likely to stop at a fast-food place after work.
“If you had a hard day at work and came home and ate a delicious, healthy meal, how do you think you would feel?” I asked.
“Well, I’m not sure it would make me feel better, but I’m sure it wouldn’t make me feel worse.”
“Let me ask you another question. How do you think you’ll feel if you leave work, eat a delicious, healthy meal, start to lose weight, and begin to get the advantages on your list: feeling better about yourself, fitting into your clothes, being able to exercise more easily, having more self-confidence socially, and things like that?”
“I’ll definitely feel good!”
Beth made a reminder card to read right before she left work:
Even if I had a hard day, go straight home and eat the healthy meal that’s waiting for me. Doing that will make me feel good and I’ll feel great when I lose weight. Stopping to get unhealthy fast food will just make me feel terrible.
Next we did some problem solving in case she didn’t have time to prepare a meal or ran out of healthy food. She came up with ideas for some quick and healthy options she could get on the way home from work. She made a list of restaurants and food shops and jotted down specific items she would get.
Then I asked her whether getting unhealthy fast food was really a treat, given how she felt afterward. She created another reminder card:
Fast food may seem like a treat, but it’s actually the opposite of a treat when I impulsively get unhealthy food and overeat. I should occasionally plan in advance to get a fast-food meal, bring it home, eat it slowly, and enjoy every bite. In between, if I want to treat myself, I should do it in nonfood ways. I could get a new book, a nice-smelling candle, a new nail polish color, or a celebrity magazine.
We also started a list of self-soothing activities Beth could do when she needed comfort. She added to the list in the coming weeks.
Comforting Activities
• Take a hot bath with aromatherapy.
• Turn on loud music and dance.
• Curl up on the sofa with a blanket and watch a romantic comedy.
• Look at my favorite pictures of friends and family.
• Walk Max, groom him, or cuddle with him on the sofa.
With these strategies in place, Beth was finally able to overcome the habit of soothing herself with food. The first few weeks were difficult; she still had to fight against her “giving-in” muscle’s strong urge to stop at a fast-food restaurant. But as time went on, her resistance muscle became stronger, and resisting became easier and easier. She gradually had less and less trouble going straight home, eating a healthy dinner, and remembering to consult her ever-growing list of self-soothing activities, which helped her get the comfort she was entitled to. She felt better and she lost weight.
Escape the Entitlement Eating Trap
People often get tripped up by their concept of being entitled to feel better. Of course they’re entitled to feel better! But trying to feel better through overeating backfires. It’s simply incompatible with the goal of losing weight and keeping it off. Like Elizabeth, you have to decide: either continue to overeat and feel better temporarily (and worse soon after) or comfort yourself in nonfood ways, lose weight, and start reaping the rewards. To escape this trap:
Read your advantages list often. You might even create multiple sets of cards, using creative lettering, different colors, photos, or images. The act of writing and routinely repeating these ideas to yourself will carve those neural grooves a little deeper.
Ask yourself which entitlement you want more: delaying distress for a few minutes or getting the advantages of healthy eating and weight loss? Consider posting a copy of your advantages list in your most vulnerable areas, such as the fridge or the pantry door.
Create your own list of comforting activities, and continue adding to it as you think of new ideas. Look for boards on Pinterest, or follow pages on Facebook or Instagram that post clever ideas for pleasurable activities.
#4: The Killing Time Trap
You turn to food when you’re bored, tired, or procrastinating.
Beth still struggled to control her eating in the evening. Some nights she would find herself, around nine or ten, standing in front of the refrigerator just wanting to eat anything. I asked Beth to think about where she felt the desire to eat. Was it in her stomach? Did she have an empty sensation in her abdomen? Or was she experiencing sensations elsewhere in her body—in her mouth, throat, upper body? Beth wasn’t sure, so she agreed to monitor herself over the coming week. She would gauge how she felt just before she went to the refrigerator, and she’d be on the lookout for where in her body the desire to eat was coming from.
Over the next week, Beth gathered some interesting data. On evenings when she was tempted to overeat, she found she was either feeling bored (with nothing she really felt like doing) or she was procrastinating (because there was something she should be doing but didn’t want to), or she was tired (but didn’t feel like going to bed). She also realized that during these evening visits to the refrigerator, she didn’t have an empty sensation in her stomach.
Even though she labeled what she was feeling as hunger, she wasn’t actually experiencing symptoms of hunger. And no wonder—she had usually just finished eating a substantial dinner an hour or two before. “I hadn’t realized it, but the desire to eat was coming from my mouth,” she said. “That surprised me. I guess it wasn’t hunger. I just wanted to eat.” She made a reminder card about this:
If I feel like eating in the evening, remind myself that I’m probably just at loose ends, not hungry, so eating isn’t the answer. Find something else to do. If I eat, I’ll reinforce my giving-in habit, feel bad about myself, and stay overweight, and I don’t want that.
Beth realized that she often had the desire to eat while watching television at night, especially when the program was somewhat boring. She channel surfed but often couldn’t find anything that really interested her. We talked about some options:
She could stop watching television and find a more engaging activity.
She could find something else to do besides eating while she watched television.
She could watch television and just accept the mildly bored feeling.
Beth weighed her options and decided she’d like to have a number of activities to choose from. First we talked about what she could do while watching television. “I’d like to get back to knitting,” she said. “I had been working on this sweater but I got too busy a few months ago and put it away.” Then we discussed a few other possibilities, and Beth made a list.
When I’m Bored (Instead of or While Watching TV)
1. Knit and listen to music.
2. Check out Facebook or YouTube.
3. Plan a vacation.
4. Do Sudoku or crossword puzzles.
5. Make an online dating profile and start to look at what guys have posted.
6. Call Thea or Jody.
Beth also recognized that feeling tired in the evening sometimes drove her to eat. “I feel kind of logy a lot of times at night. Eating wakes me up a little so I can do things, like finish chores.” She agreed that doing ten jumping jacks might serve the same purpose. At other times, Beth ate because she didn’t feel like getting ready for bed and eating let her postpone the inevitable. I explained that eating when tired led to weight gain. And going to bed later than she should made her more tired the next day—which made it harder to stick to her plan.
To steer herself away from tired eating, Beth instituted a mandatory bedtime: in bed by ten-thirty and lights out by eleven. She set two alarms on her phone:
The first would go off at ten-fifteen, as a reminder that she had fifteen minutes to wrap up whatever she was doing.
The second would go off at ten-thirty, to remind her that it was time to get in bed.
And she made the following reminder card:
Nothing good ever happens when I stay up past 11. I just eat (actually overeat) to stay awake, and then I feel tired and stressed the next day. Get in bed. Anything I’m doing will still be there tomorrow.
Finally we discussed eating as a form of procrastination, such as when she had to pay bills or fill out health insurance forms. We talked about how she could spend just five minutes on a task she felt like avoiding and then decide whether to continue it or start another noneating activity. Or she could decide to avoid the task but commit to a specific time to do it within the next few days.
Beth worked hard in the coming few weeks to label what she was experiencing when she wanted to eat but wasn’t hungry and to learn to accept feeling the mild—and temporary—discomfort of not eating after her planned snack at night. She realized that the greater discomfort of being overweight would go on and on if she kept eating. Staying in control of her eating got progressively easier the more she told herself, “I’m just bored (or tired or feel like procrastinating). That’s not a reason to eat. Go do something else. This feeling will pass.” And it always did.
Escape the Killing Time Trap
Many dieters don’t recognize their eating triggers, especially if the trigger is mild discomfort. The next time you find yourself eating and aren’t sure why, ask yourself whether you’re feeling a little uncomfortable or fatigued. If so, you will need to break the cycle.
When you’re tempted to eat even though you haven’t been triggered by hunger or specific foods, ask yourself whether you’re bored, at loose ends, or procrastinating. Label the feeling. Just the awareness alone is sometimes enough to break the spell.
Create a reminder card so you will remember the consequences of unplanned eating.
If you eat to improve alertness, try some quick exercise instead.
Ask yourself if you’d rather stay overweight or break the habit of eating when you’re not supposed to. Create a list of other activities to refocus your attention away from food or choose to accept the mild discomfort you’re experiencing.
Creating Escape Plans for Emotional Eating
We have found that most people who struggle with dieting stumble into emotional eating traps because they have entrenched habits of using food to make themselves feel better. But the consequences of using eating as a coping strategy can bring huge, long-lasting disadvantages. Consider whether any of the emotional eating traps apply to you, then create your own escape plans.
Identify a future situation in which an emotional eating trap might arise.
Record your sabotaging thoughts.
Write a compelling response to each sabotaging thought.
Develop a list of strategies.
Review and revise your escape plan often.
Consider the following sample escape plan as you brainstorm and craft your own.
Escape Plan: Emotional Eating Trap
Situation #1: Feeling lonely at night. I’m sad that my husband and I have grown apart. Sometimes it seems like food is my best friend.
| Sabotaging Thoughts | Reminders | Strategies |
|
I’m lonely. I deserve to treat myself with extra ice cream. Ice cream is the only thing that makes me feel better. It’s not fair that I can’t comfort myself with food. |
It’s true that I’m lonely. I need to accept the feeling and deal with loneliness in another way. If I binge on ice cream, I’ll still feel lonely plus I’ll feel bad about myself. It’s not true that ice cream is the only thing that makes me feel better. I’d also feel better if I called my friends and connected with them. What would be even more unfair is if I let a sense of unfairness stand in my way of losing weight, which is really important to me. |
Start buying only a single ice cream treat each day to eat at night. Throw away the pints of ice cream that are already in the freezer. Figure out ways to get together with friends on at least a couple of evenings a week. Go to the movies by myself. Save errands for nighttime. Call Ruthie! Call Maureen! Connect with Lois and Barbara through e-mail. Ask Phyllis to take a walk with me after dinner on weekdays. Look into taking a Spanish course. Enlist my friends to help me figure out what else to do to make my life better. |
Reflect and Recommit: Why I Want to Escape This Trap
Emotional eating is a learned behavior, and it is entirely optional. You can make the choice to allow emotional eating to control you and derail your weight-loss efforts. Or you can make a change.
When you’re upset, would you rather have just the original problem that distressed you? Or do you want to have that problem plus feeling bad about overeating? And then add the problem of extra pounds as well?
In other words, do you want to have one problem—or do you want to have three?
Emotional eating traps require a consistent, steady response, and those habits can be hard to kick. The more you can predict upsetting situations, the more you can prepare yourself to do something other than eating. Start right now, so you’ll be ready when the next wave of negative feelings washes over you. Take a few minutes to write one final summary reminder card to motivate you to make changes and keep making changes.