Emotional eating and overeating is often a coping mechanism for coping with the things in life that stress and challenge us. Ever noticed how you tend to eat more unhealthy foods when you are feeling stressed out? That’s because we have this pattern in our lives of eating in an effort to cope with both positive and negative circumstances in our lives. With emotional eating, we are eating to feel better, and consequently go for the comfort food….. and so we make bad food choices.
However, there are are techniques and things that you can do to help cope and to lessen the likely-hood of overeating.
Sadly, for a lot of us, emotional eating has become a chronic occurrence, rather than simply overeating on the occasional occurrence. This habit can then have devastating effects on our health, our wellbeing, body-image, and self esteem.
Awareness
What then is the first step in combatting this dysfunctional coping skill? 
It is awareness. It’s about recognising when you reach for the comfort food, when you are eating to soothe your emotions. Try to identify and feel the emotion that is behind your unhealthy eating.
- Are you aware you may be eating mindlessly when your emotions are stirred up, such as when you are feeling sad, angry, bored, unhappy or somewhat depressed? Do you reach for the junk food when feeling stressed?
- Are your eating habits a way to cope with negative feelings?
- In general, have you slipped into the habit of eating more junk food than healthy choices?
- Do you binge eat?
- Do you often feel guilt after eating?
If you can identify with any of the above, then it is a sign you are eating to comfort or curb your emotions, rather than reaching for food because you are genuinely hungry.
It is extremely helpful to become aware of and recognise these connections, as emotional eating and overeating often leads to unhealthy food choices and obesity. Once you can recognise what you are doing, the next step is to try and replace this habit with alternative coping skills to replace the emotional overeating and poor food choices.
Try to arm yourself with some alternative healthy coping skills and begin to utilise them so that you will make better food choices and develop healthier habits. This will reduce your need to head for the refrigerator for comfort and peace of mind.
Better Coping Skills 
Here are a few healthier coping skills you might try to ease the pain of negative emotions rather than just overeating.
- Keep a journal about your feelings. Writing about your feelings helps you identify them and raises your awareness about what’s going on in your life that might be triggering the overeating. And when you express negative feelings on paper, they tend to dissipate.
- Try exercise. When you are stressed out or feeling negative emotions, try taking a walk or cycling for a bit. Do this before you eat. It may be that some exercise does not curb your habit of emotional eating, but it will help raise your metabolic rate and burn some calories , making it less likely for you to gain weight from your eating habits.
- Try some simple meditation when you are under stress. Just fifteen minutes of muscle relaxation and focusing on your breathing can lead to less stress in your mind and refresh you. Often you may find you loose the sudden urge to eat that you had before you meditated. You will find that meditation can help distract you from the things that are stressing you. It can also help keep your mind sharp and help you gain awareness of the things that are pushing you to overeat.
- When you eat, eat slowly. Take your time while eating, even if you feel you must eat to dissipate negative emotions. Eating slowly allows you to get the benefit of the food reward and as well, it gives your body a chance to keep up and let you know when you are full. There is a much lesser chance you will overeat when you eat slowly.
- Keep only healthy foods in the house. A helpful way of reducing the likelihood of consuming copious amounts of unhealthy food to soothe your emotions is to make sure that the only choices you have immediately on hand are healthy choices – healthy foods.
One of the hallmarks of emotional eating is irresistible and urging cravings for junk food that come out of nowhere, and so when you have your favourite junk food in the house, it makes it much more difficult to resist. So start now by cleaning out the cupboards to reinforce your commitment to making some changes to your eating habits. You can dissipate anger by crunching on carrots in the same way as if you are crunching on potato chips. It the same habit, but you will be making much healthier food choices in order to cope with your emotions and your stressors. - Pick up the phone to talk to someone. Talking to someone you can trust , and who will listen intently and without judgement will help you feel much better – without having to console yourself with food. You will find that your stressors will dissipate as you verbalise what’s going on for you. This will also help you process your feelings and emotions without food. It is sometimes much better and much more therapeutic to be filled with kindness and compassion instead of a whole lot of empty calories.