Specialist Treatment for Eating Disorders at The London Centre

Emotional Eating

what is emotional eating?

Emotional eating (or comfort eating) affects a growing number of people in the UK. Emotional eating refers to any eating (over or under eating) which is driven by a psychological or emotional trigger, rather than a physiological trigger (such as hunger or fullness). For example, people will often eat as a result of stress or in response to a distressing life event, rather than employing other, more adaptive coping mechanisms. However, whilst emotional eating may initially soothe or “numb” any difficult emotions, it doesn’t fix the underlying problem and typically results in feelings of guilt, shame or powerlessness in the long run.

 

 

Health at every size

Sometimes weight and emotional eating can form a vicious cycle. People are distressed by their weight or body shape, and use eating as a way to avoid or numb these emotions. However, this typically feeds back into body image or weight concerns.

When this is an issue, your therapist may talk to you about the “Health at Every Size”® approach. The HAES® approach shifts the focus from weight to health, and can support recovery from an eating disorder. Research shows that weight loss rarely works, and maintenance of weight loss is most likely when the weight loss is modest. Whilst accepting the correlation between higher weight and certain medical condition, HAES® questions whether this is a causal relationship. It suggests that it is not the weight loss that is important, but the changes in behaviour (which may happen to result in weight loss). Given that, HAES® encourages you to accept your body’s set-point, to develop intuitive eating, and to introduce pleasurable movement (exercising for pleasure rather than weight loss). Several clinical trials comparing HAES® to conventional obesity treatment have shown improvements in physiological, behavioral, and psychological measures, including improvements in blood pressure and blood cholesterol levels.

 

 

treatment for emotional eating

Treatment for emotional eating involves becoming more aware of the triggers for your emotional eating and learning to adopt healthier emotion regulation strategies so that you can cope effectively with life stressors of difficult emotions. Useful treatments include guided self-help (typically CBT), CBT or DBT.