If you eat normally most of the time and do not binge, you will be able to maintain a stable weight even if you occasionally eat for emotional reasons. However, if you want to lose weight, you may need to work harder to reduce the frequency of emotional eating.
Linda Craighead, Appetite Awareness Workbook
Emotional eating has been a long-standing bugaboo in the diet literature. Many wars have been waged on emotional eating and just as many have been lost. Emotional eating has been the villain of weight loss, the ominous relapse factor that heralds that short-lived moment of “forget it,” self-liberation from self-imposed dietary constraints. This kind of history comes with momentum – the prejudice against emotional eating is not to be underestimated. With this in mind, as a clinician who is willing to offer mindful emotional eating retraining, you’d do well to be prepared for addressing the following question: “How does mindful emotional eating play into weight management?” This chapter is the answer to this question.
If your client is on a diet, it’s their business. If they ask you about what you think about diets, you can tell them and then it’s their business again as to how they are going to integrate your opinion about dieting. My opinion is that diets sell books but don’t really work. Diets are based on self-denial and self-denial is exhausting. Self-denial is a lousy platform for long-term self-change. Self-denials run us down. Diets are made of endless “No’s” to yourself and that depletes our egos, impoverishes our quality of life, and weakens our capacity for self-control. A good bit of emotional eating is compensatory in nature, a reaction to diet-based self-deprivation. Let’s face it – diets are stressful. With all of this in mind, we can conclude that mindful emotional eating not as a threat to a diet (if you have to be on one) but is a kind of maintenance mechanism. It’s pretty much inevitable – whether you are on a diet or not – that sooner or later you’ll feel like you want to take a coping shortcut by eating. Whenever you develop this urge, if you are lacking ego resources to white-knuckle your way through it, you’ll be faced with a decision point: To eat to cope or not to eat to cope. A cookie has never killed anyone. I’d rather you mindfully indulge in a cookie or two than keep white-knuckling your way through this craving until you exhaust yourself, totally break down and binge. Seen this way, mindful emotional eating is an ally to dieting, not an enemy; a stabilizing, relapse prevention measure rather than a catastrophic regimen threat. In sum, my thesis is this: Mindful emotional eating assures the longevity of your dieting effort.
Whether you are on a diet or not, emotional eating, as a temptation, is always around the corner. Mindless emotional eating, despite its modest beginnings, often insidiously grows into a binge. What starts out as a small indulgence not infrequently becomes an abstinence violation effect “forget it.” moment. Indeed, you decide: “I’ll just have a serving of ice cream… I’ve been good all week, I deserve it.” Of course, you do. Who doesn’t deserve ice cream? The problem is that a) you are not hungry, and b) you’ve got a TV remote in your hand. So, as you plug into the mindless matrix of TV, your mind goes AWOL and before you know it your body is full but your mind is still empty – empty of pleasure and satisfaction, that is, as you feel that you didn’t even notice the ice cream. So, you head for seconds because you didn’t have the firsts in the first place. But then the story repeats: your body has the seconds, but your mind – plugged into TV – remains devoid of conscious experience. So, you head out for the thirds and somewhere around that time you decide: “forget it. It’s a binge, I’ll get back on track tomorrow.”
The point is that mindless emotional eating almost always results in overeating. Mindful emotional eating is different, its very point is conscious pleasure, savoring, being in the moment, noticing the experience and benefiting from it. As such, mindful emotional eating is fundamentally more satisfying. As mentioned before, mindful emotional eating leverages more coping per calorie. As a result, you have a moment of nutritionally unnecessary but emotionally necessitated pleasure and you don’t overeat all that much. Sure, you still eat more than you would have had you just been eating to satisfy hunger. But the point is that you don’t stuff yourself. Put differently, mindful emotional eating is self-limiting. Mindful, effective emotional eating stops itself. So, when you contrast the two – mindless emotional eating and mindful emotional eating – the latter is less nutritionally hazardous. With all things taken into consideration, if you are able to make a shift from mindless emotional eating to mindful emotional eating, you will end up eating less. And as such, with all other lifestyle factors being equal, mindful emotional eating can be seen as a weight loss factor in and of itself.
A slip is when you want to eat to cope and you don’t. You waiver but you regain your composure – through willpower or skillpower, by white-knuckling or through impulse control and relaxation. A lapse is when you go ahead and have an emotional eating episode. A relapse is when, having lapsed once, you say “forget it.” to yourself and go off track. Catching yourself, not at the moment of the slip, but in the process of the lapse and deciding that instead of having a mindless emotional eating episode (that is likely to become a binge and derail you for days) you will have a mindful emotional eating episode is a quintessential relapse prevention measure. It’s harm reduction: Instead of mindlessly having a bag of cookies, you mindfully and consciously choose to have two or three; as a result, instead of having a lapse of control, you have a sense of regained control. And in so doing, you prevent an open-ended relapse. The train off the track, dangerously lurches as if about to fall into the abyss of dysregulation, but does, nevertheless, touch all of its wheels on the other end of this precarious business of controlled eating. A happy end.
In sum, mindful emotional eating is an asset not a liability – an ally not an enemy to any weight management project. Sure, it’s counterintuitive but so is parallel parking. Worry not, you’ll figure it out. As a clinical adviser, once again have the courage to encourage your client to experiment. Fear not the consequence: Mindful eating, like anything of value, has a reasonably steep learning curve. So, it’s important to see where you are going with all of this lest you lose sight of the destination. Help your client see the rationale behind mindful emotional eating. Explain as much as you can and leave it to the client to choose to try or not to try, to dare or not to dare, to change or not to change. The ultimate responsibility for the outcome is on your client, not on you. Stay modest in your clinical mandate as an advisor and a consultant, and that’ll help you not fear the consequence of your client’s trials and errors. But should you allow your own fears get in the way, your client will be stuck in a stifling and disempowering mindset of abstinence and self-mistrust.