Most of us are familiar with the phrase “emotional eating,” turning to comfort food to soothe negative feelings such as depression, anxiety, or anger, but also sometimes to enhance joyous, celebratory feelings in response, let’s say, to a birthday or promotion. If you often experience out-of-control eating to manage your feelings and to self-soothe—in other words, for reasons other than having a healthy appetite—it’s likely you’re an emotional eater.
If you are, this matters a lot to you and your weight, because out of the seven overeating styles Larry and I identified, Emotional Eating surfaced as the strongest predictor of overeating—and the number-one contributor of weight gain. Indeed, although all seven overeating styles are significantly linked to overeating and becoming overweight and obese, Emotional Eating was leaps and bounds ahead of the others as a predictor for overeating and weight gain.
Another powerful insight is this: Emotional Eating is just a nose length ahead of the Fast Foodism overeating style in predicting obesity. Put another way, the two overeating styles of Emotional Eating and Fast Foodism are the strongest drivers of overeating and becoming overweight and obese.
Shedding still more light on this overeating style is the family of negative emotions we identified that are strongly linked with the likelihood of an emotional-eating episode. Here they are, ranked from highest to lowest: anxiety, frustration, depression, anger, and sadness. And though it’s not exactly an emotion, we define “food cravings” as the sixth negative emotion in the Emotional Eating overeating style. Think of these negative emotions like genes shared by close siblings. If you experience one emotion, such as depression, you are also more likely to experience other emotions such as frustration, anxiety, or anger.
With yet another twist of our statistical kaleidoscope, we gleaned insights into improvements emotional eaters made—in both overeating and weight loss—after they completed my six-week, eighteen-lesson e-course on Whole Person Integrative Eating.
Our key finding: the combination of reducing negative feelings and improving food choices were the strongest predictors of how much weight people lost. In other words, feelings and food choices are key factors in controlling weight.
