Eat When Hungry:
Simple Ways to Enjoy Food Without Feeling Out of Control
A Special Report by Portland Coaching & Counseling Center

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Eat When Hungry:

Turning to food to deal with feelings is a common habit. People often feel like eating when they're dealing with a difficult problem, or feeling bored or restless. Unfortunately eating doesn’t work very well as a method for dealing with emotions. Angry feelings, worry, stress sadness or loneliness trouble us in day to day life, but eating in response has a boomerang effect of coming back and making people feel worse. A slippery slope follows; nibbling or snacking turn into eating too much, sometimes way too much, especially when we are indulging in foods that are dense with calories and nutrient-poor.

Here are strategies for getting control of emotional eating habits. These ideas will give you support for keeping on top of your health goals and maintaining proper weight.

Major or minor stresses can prompt the emotions that lead to overeating. Any stressful experience such as a health crisis, job loss or divorce can bring on excessive eating, but it can also be prompted by a sensation as simple as feeling nervous about a social event, or annoyed about being late for a meeting. Many inescapable everyday events can lead to the urge to overeat.

Food does offer a reliable source of pleasure, and we are wired to build positive associations with certain food types or eating habits that provide us comfort. There is a literal “chemical reward” from eating, as well as the ritualized habits and associations from our favorite indulgence foods. In a difficult situation, the body produces a higher level of cortisol, a stress hormone. This tends to cause craving for the food that's bad for you, sweet treats and salty snacks.

Although there are numerous biochemical processes involved when we ingest and metabolize nutrients, all you really need to understand is that eating food changes the chemical balance in the body. From infancy, feeling full of food is a sensation we associate with comfort. This pleasurable feeling counteracts negative emotions.

When you're eating, a part of your mind goes toward smelling, chewing, looking at, and otherwise experiencing the taste and texture of the food. This gives you a lot of sensory input, which distracts you from negative thoughts.

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Whether you are really paying attention to what you are doing or not, eating can be an attempt to bring your awareness back to your body when you have been consumed with activity or thinking. Taking time to purchase, prepare and clean up after eating is another way to soothe yourself, and also provides you with a sensation of being busy and purposeful. Eating for emotional gratification is not inherently wrong or unhealthy. It’s a natural behavior. Problems develop when this becomes a habitual, reflexive way of coping with stress or soothing emotional problems.

When you over-eat, you give yourself the physical sensation of being too full. This stops you from paying much attention to your thoughts, and for a while it distracts your mind from thinking about your worries and concerns.

The powerful system that signals flavor and texture to the brain creates contentment; but if we're eating when we are actually not hungry, the food is much less satisfying. The signals of when to start and stop eating get confused in the body. It’s a lot like a thermostat that isn’t working and can’t “tell” whether to cool down or warm up the room.

Maybe you have been on a backpacking trip, gathered around the fire-pit at the end of the day with other campers. Everybody exclaims that the food tastes fantastic; even if you're just eating hot dogs, or rice and beans, everyone seems to love the food outdoors. This happens because we are meant to eat when we are so very hungry, after activity; not to routinely sit down to a meal of multiple foods after a full day of sitting in an office, or driving our car.

If you have developed a habit of eating a lot of food in a short time, you probably aren’t thinking very clearly about what you’re doing, or recognizing how you feel as you eat. The stimulation and the actions you are engaging in to eat, make you too busy to recognize what is going on emotionally, or to stay “tuned in” to the physical signals your body is sending. This becomes a habit people fall into as part of their day to day routine, or you may eat more when you have an especially stressful day.

We associate food with celebrations and togetherness. You may find your over-eating occurs in social situations, when you are feeling especially good. This is probably caused by inattention but could also be a way to deal with shy feelings or relationship conflicts with others in attendance. Most often though, people do their stress eating alone.

Sometimes people even find themselves wishing they were hungry when they're not, because then they would have a reason to eat. If you ever have a sensation like that, it provides an opportunity to tune into what it is you really do want at that particular moment. It could provide you with valuable awareness to stop at this time and pay attention to the feelings you’re having. You may even realize you would like to make larger scale changes in your life.

Food can provide a very temporary distraction from emotional needs that we aren’t paying sufficient attention to. You may think you need to fit into a smaller dress or pants size when what you really need is a bigger job, where you get more respect; an intimate relationship that allows you more room to express your needs and longings; or a family that provides you with more support and consideration.

It can feel overwhelming to think that you have bigger problems to tackle besides finding a new diet that works, and the sensory experience of being full can block out worrisome thoughts or resentful emotions very effectively. Yet part of making changes about your eating habits can be extremely simple: just begin to practice identifying whether there is indeed an emotional component to the sensations of hunger. You aren’t committing to anything. You don’t need to take everything on at once.

For instance, just noticing, “I really felt like stopping for donuts this morning on the drive in to work. I know I said I wouldn’t, but my boss is so cranky lately and it‘s hard to go in there and deal with snippy people all day. I realize that I’m telling myself I deserve a treat because it seems like it makes it easier to put up with everyone else’s bad moods,” could be useful information about an emotional experience that often occurs outside your awareness. Like a soundtrack in a movie, it creates a mood and atmosphere behind the scenes, even if we’re not conscious of hearing it.

What are your best guesses about issues or concerns that may be related to your emotional eating? How about these areas of your life?

• Unhappy in your relationship
• Lonely because you’re single
• Conflict with family members
• Parenting responsibilities overwhelming
• Stress at work
• Frustrated because of lack of free time
• Boredom and lack of energy or purpose

Other potential causes of overeating habits include poor sleep, or inadequate nutrition. Evaluate, too, whether you may be dealing with side effects from medication. Birth control pills, antidepressants and even some common allergy medications can increase your appetite and make it difficult to maintain healthy weight.

Is it possible you’re affected by lack of sleep? Little-known fact: if you don't get enough sleep, your body will automatically think it needs twice the amount of calories it really does to get through the day! Immune functioning and decreased longevity are also associated with poor sleep, but perhaps the desire to be slender and attractive is what it will take to get our attention. In the U.S., we are actually facing an epidemic of insomnia and insufficient sleep. This is to be taken very seriously! The best solution is to go to bed earlier. If that’s just not possible, or you go to bed and can’t get to sleep for a long time anyway, try to take a nap.

When you get enough sleep, your mood is also more stable and it becomes less likely that you will feel reactive and upset when stress comes. Another element of the need for sleep is that our hormones are more likely to be effectively regulated when we sleep properly, and hormones, especially for women, have a powerful influence on weight control.

Strategies
The pause: before you eat, allow yourself to evaluate your immediate need. If you conclude you are actually getting adequate sleep, not taking appetite-affecting medication, and are primarily troubled by emotional eating, then building this crucial habit into your life is essential. It takes practice and ingenuity to get yourself to pause and consider if you're even hungry.

• Do you have sensations of squeezing or growling in your stomach?
• Do you lack energy, feel weak?
• When did you last eat?

Evaluate how hungry you are: Picture a horizontal line in your mind, numbered 1-5. Where would you place your sensations of hunger right now? There’s no need to bargain with yourself, you can still decide to eat, whatever the number is; but it’s a useful habit to just create that picture in your mind and get a reading on how much you desire food versus actually needing to eat to satiate hunger.

Ask yourself,” Am I physically hungry or am I just trying to comfort myself with food?” You may decide to eat anyway. But if you are able to develop the habit of pausing, here are some alternatives you may find more even appealing than cookies, chips, or other comfort foods.

Low-fat diets, especially over the course of time, can be a hidden culprit in difficulty with maintaining proper body weight. Your body is meant to run on fat as a fuel, and trying to live on bread, pastries, or pasta is not a sustainable plan. Your body needs the nourishment of fat, and will trick you into feeling hungry and eating too much other food if you won’t allow yourself enough of it.

Emergency Measures: See if you can try at least one of these alternatives before an episode of eating emotionally.

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Talk to a friend. This is one of the most reliable, time-honored methods of dealing with any problem under the sun. Knowing that someone else can share your burden, lend perspective, commiserate or just listen will give deeper comfort than food ever can. Zero calories!

Write in a journal. Journal keeping has so many benefits besides just managing stress or dealing with weight. When a friend is not available, or your feelings are too raw, the written word on the page can provide the same kind of perspective and objectivity that we experience in conversation with a good friend. Seeing your thoughts written out, and being able to refer back to them to remind yourself of how feelings constantly shift and change, can give you enormous relief.

Avoid isolation. Ever wonder why Alcoholics Anonymous has become such a successful and stunningly effective organization? We're built for social contact. Not so long ago, it was essential to our physical survival, and here's a little secret: that hasn't changed.

Exercise is a fabulous way to get rid of tension. No matter the weather, if you can get yourself to step outside and start walking, the urge to eat will often fade. Being outdoors provides us with the kind of visual and sensory stimulation that our nervous systems crave. If you have a human body and you want to keep it, you might just find you’re able to actually enjoy exercise!

Drink water. Much of the time your body could well be dehydrated, and while you may believe you need to eat, what you really need is a drink. Of water, that is. Drinking water aids your digestive processes, helps in blood purification, fluffs up your cells and just all around makes your day go better.

Engage in some form of luxurious, pampering self-care. Taking a bath is one obvious way that you could bring this into your day. What else would create a sensation of indulgence and physical delight for you? You could fill up quite a bit of space in your journal fantasizing about this. Then you would have a list ready to go, for when you really need it.

Lifestyle Changes
Identify hobbies that would preoccupy you and consume your attention. Knitting, puzzles, fix-it projects all occupy your mind and hold some possibility for a sensation of satisfaction, without the mindlessness and fallout of bingeing on food. Again, if you're not quite ready to start new projects, start making a list of them in a journal or notebook, so that you can create a master plan of where to begin and what you'd most like to do.

Don’t self-criticize. The only diet you really do need to put yourself on is a self-criticism diet. It serves no purpose, and it's just not in your best interests. Here too, the journal can be helpful for spilling out the negative feelings so you can examine them in the light of day. Then you could tear up those journal pages into shreds, burn them up in a fire, or any other method of aggressive destruction that pleases you. Really, this would be perfectly okay to do, and you may actually be surprised at how good it feels.

Eat at the table, all the time. Yes you may miss munching a bowl of popcorn in front of the television, or the convenience of grabbing a muffin in the car on the way to work; but when you're eating for the real pleasures of enjoyment and nourishing your body, nothing less than your full attention will do.

Modify your environment; we already mentioned that fat is actually your friend. Keep plenty of healthy readily prepared foods on hand such as precut fresh fruits and vegetables or your choice of protein foods. If you made no other changes, just setting yourself up for success in this way by having healthy options be the most convenient options too, you'd probably eventually just find yourself comfortable with your body.

For that matter, make sure you're eating regular healthful meals that provide sufficient nutrition. When you are satisfied by healthful meals, you're much less likely to overdo it on snacks and treats. This is another example of how when we are able to listen to the body, we have no problem. Part of what gets us in trouble in modern life is that the mind’s in charge of deciding what we eat. We are also surrounded constantly by pictures, smells and offerings of food that set off powerful memories. These images and products create an illusion that food will satisfy us in a way that it never can

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Comforting rituals There are so many good ways that food and drink can be used purely to nurture. Making a time of day for tea is a worldwide, treasured ritual of attending to comfort needs appropriately. Allowing rest and avoidance for a little while can be an extremely wise and soothing routine. This is very different from dealing with boredom and stress through turning to habits involving sugar, fat and coffee in order to gain a burst of energy.

Pacing yourself You've heard it a thousand times: eat slowly. Enough said.

Surrender Stop trying to be “on a diet”. Diets are one of the top causes of emotional eating. Dieting stirs all our primitive, baby-like emotions of being frustrated and angry when we have to “go without”. Don't deprive yourself of the foods you love. Eat them as part of a plan, maintain control, and use moderation. If you allow yourself these foods on occasion, whatever your forbidden favorites, the more you plan and give yourself permission to have them once in a while, the less power they will hold over you. Just eat sensibly, however you choose to eat.

You know what is and is not good for your body, no need for lectures or moralizing. Continually thinking about restricting your food intake and counting calories really backfires for most people, and is no way to live.

Substitution, not stopping Don’t try to stop eating particular foods; instead, equip yourself with a healthy list of substitute activities. When you feel like eating for its entertainment value, take a walk, turn on some music, dance, pick up a magazine or the telephone, or sit down with some magazines and a pen and sketch out a plan for a vacation, even if you're only going to Fantasy Island.

Making a successful change when you have gotten into the habit of emotional eating means paying attention to why you're eating, more than focusing on what you're eating or how much.

Learn what sets emotional eating in motion: foods, situations, moods, people. Here's an example of the kind of log you can keep for a week or so: just get a small pocket or purse sized notebook and create columns for the foods you eat, quantity, time of day, how you're feeling emotionally, and how physically hungry you are at the time. You could use a number rating scale for measuring how hungry you are.

This will give you plenty of practice recognizing actual physical hunger. It also makes it difficult to continue ignoring your emotions, covering up feelings, overeating and not even knowing why. Part of the reason you started eating to seek emotional comfort in the first place was probably related to inability to soothe yourself in other ways. When you're tracking these feelings and behaviors, even for a relatively short time, like 3 or 4 days, you may be startled at patterns that become apparent.

We call the behavior “emotional eating,” but it's actually eating that occurs in response to emotions that are beneath the surface. The feelings that go unnoticed can be so much more easily understood when we're taking the time to write them down. They may have become too difficult to control in the course of everyday life, and food provides a powerful relief. When you track your thoughts, feelings and sensations in a log like this, it will help you know when you really want food and when you might be looking for understanding, reassurance or security.

There are many emotional reasons people may overeat. Vulnerabilities include:

• low self-esteem
  
• need for approval by others
  
• unusually high need to be in control of one's environment and feelings
  
• perfectionism
  
• feeling undeserving of pleasure and happiness
  
• disappointment in oneself and feelings of being a failure
  
• trouble controlling impulses
  
• depressed feelings
  
• loneliness
  
• anxious feelings and worry
  
• trouble putting feelings into words or otherwise expressing them
  
• obsession with the idea of being thin
  
• distorted body image
  
• past experiences of being shamed, teased or ridiculed for being overweight
  
• growing up with family members who have an unhealthy relationship with food or their bodies
  
• being raised by parents with unrealistic expectations

It's typically very difficult to stop the unhealthy eating by yourself. This is especially true when eating patterns have become intertwined with complex emotional problems like those on this list. If you are dealing with these kinds of concerns, or if you’ve just had enough and want to get over the emotional eating, meeting with a coach or counselor who focuses on weight concerns can be extremely helpful. It’s entirely possible to stop struggling with food and get on with your life.

Whatever path you take, it’s very important that you regularly reward yourself for the changes you're attempting. If you have slipups, and don't eat as you intended, move on and treat the rest of the day or the next day as a fresh start. Avoid berating yourself; write down what happened, or try to learn from the event. Make a plan for how you can prevent this kind of occurrence next time; figure out the vulnerabilities in your circumstances, attitude, or interactions with others. Focus your attention on the positive efforts you are making, and the progress you’re experiencing. As in other aspects of life, put your attention and energy on how you'd like things to be, and this will increase the probability that you'll get there.

For a First Aid Immediate Action Kit, to help intercept your eating when you feel like going overboard, just enter your email here and you can have these tools to start practicing right away.