Food has so many ties to our emotions. For our entire lives, food has been a way to celebrate, a reward for a big accomplishment, a way to cheer up when we’re sad, a way to be distracted from disappointments, a way to occupy us when we’re bored. When you really think about it, no wonder so many people have issues with using food as a way to cope with emotions - it’s been happening our whole lives. They’ve been tethered together from the very beginning.
Emotional eating involves seeing food not as a source of fuel for your body to function, but instead as a comfort that can be used to improve your emotional state. If you see food as an instant cure-all for your struggles in life, it can make weight loss on keto (or any diet) extremely difficult. Not taking the time to honour your feelings, or silencing your emotions with food to stay numb, can make it feel impossible to get out of a negative diet cycle.
GRAB YOUR FREE 30 DAY JOURNAL PROMPTS FOR EMOTIONAL EATING ON KETO BELOW!
Everyone eats outside of body fuel or pure hunger from time to time, like at a celebration, and that’s totally normal. Some people may not understand what it feels like to be chained to this vicious cycle of emotional eating. They don’t understand that “just don’t eat as much” isn’t great advice because it’s just not that simple.
When eating becomes your primary way to cope with unwanted negative and stressful emotions, it leads to a series of addictive behaviours. The original painful emotion still remains, but now there’s additional guilt, shame and regret piled on top. This excess eating can cause you to derail any progress on your keto diet, stall any weight loss, or may even cause weight gain.
WHY DO SOME PEOPLE USE FOOD TO COPE?
Emotional eating is generally brought on by feelings of stress, loneliness, sadness, fear, or even deeper issues like depression, major life events, relationship conflict or chronic health issues. These negative emotions often leave a person feeling empty or like there is a void in themselves or their life. Food is then believed to be able to fill that void, and give them a false sense of temporary wholeness.
Other factors include:
Retreating from social situations when in a state of emotional need
Not participating in activities that may otherwise relieve that stress
Not understanding the difference between emotional and physical hunger
Using negative self talk to create a cycle of emotional eating
Changing cortisol levels in the body related to stress, causing cravings
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EMOTIONAL & PHYSICAL HUNGER?
One of the first things to understand in order to address your emotional eating, is learning how to identify the difference between what is true, physical hunger vs perceived, emotional hunger.
Emotional Hunger:
Comes on suddenly
You crave only certain types of foods
You may binge on food without ever feeling full
You eat mindlessly, eating without any awareness until that food is gone
You feel guilt or shame about eating
Physical Hunger:
Develops slowly over time
Desire to eat a variety of foods
You feel the sensation of fullness, and use it as a cue to stop eating
You eat mindfully, and are aware of what you’re eating
You have no negative feelings about eating
GRAB YOUR FREE 30 DAY JOURNAL PROMPTS FOR EMOTIONAL EATING ON KETO BELOW!
HOW TO MANAGE EMOTIONAL EATING
1) Face Your Feelings Head-On
When we use food to cope with our emotions, we are really only temporarily numbing ourselves from our negative feelings. Then once we’ve binged on something, we are left feeling even worse because the original emotion hasn’t been dealt with, as we pile on guilt, shame and regret from overeating.
This cycle will never stop until we can address our feelings head on. It becomes a default pattern in our behaviour to the point where we aren’t even sure HOW to feel, or what those feelings even are. We are resisting and avoiding what we actually feel because we’re afraid of discomfort, and that resistance can trigger us to use food to cope.
Next time you feel an urge to use food as a way to cope with stress or a negative emotion, give yourself 10 minutes. Set an alarm if you have to and just sit with that emotion for 10 minutes, and feel it. Name it. Identify it. Notice how that emotion feels within your body.
This may feel extremely awkward at first if your default response is using food, but just sit without judgement and allow yourself to feel the emotion fully. It will be uncomfortable, but nothing REALLY bad is going to happen. What’s 10 minutes of sitting in an emotion, to feel your feelings fully, compared to the amount of guilt and disappointment you may feel after a binge? And once you have a better understanding of what the emotion even is, you’ll have made the first major step to overcoming emotional eating.
2) Identify Your Triggers
Think about the times you tend to emotionally eat. How were you feeling? What was going on in your life? What happened just before eating? Does it happen at a specific time of day? When you are better able to identify a pattern in what triggers you to emotionally eat, you will be able to find alternative methods to cope that do not involve food.
3) Journal For Discovery
We’re not talking about the “Dear Diary’s” of our youth, but using the writing process to help discover what’s really going on in our conscious and MORE OFTEN, subconscious mind. Sometimes we can get so deep into our own thoughts, that the act of simply writing it out makes it more real. Suddenly your feelings and emotions are not just circling around your mind, but sitting right there in front of you in black and white, ink on paper, in the real world.
One of the best ways to truly connect our heads with our hearts, is through our hands. Again, this may feel awkward and uncomfortable at first but it can be such a powerful tool to uncover what’s really going on, instead of using food to stay numb. Set aside a specific time each day for a journal practice. There is no right or wrong way to do it. Just let whatever flows naturally come out, without judgment or worrying about punctuation or grammar.
GRAB YOUR FREE 30 DAY JOURNAL PROMPTS FOR EMOTIONAL EATING ON KETO BELOW!
4) Be Kind To Your Mind
As with anything truly worth it in life, it takes practice. This is no different when it comes to our eating patterns and behaviours. Our brains are designed to be efficient and do what’s easy. If you’ve been using emotional eating as a way to deal with your feelings for a long time, that becomes your default coping mechanism. And your efficient brain will want to continue that cycle, because that’s all it knows.
Will you get it right 100% of the time as you work to overcome emotional eating? Maybe not. But you need to be willing to learn from any setbacks, identify triggers, and be aware of what you can improve on next time. As you develop this awareness, the easier it will get. The more you practice, the easier it will get. So remember to be patient with yourself, and don’t give up!
5) Practice Mindful Eating Habits
Being more mindful can help us differentiate physical hunger vs emotional hunger. Creating more awareness around your meals in general and focusing on eating when you are actually hungry can help the impulse of emotional eating. Give those appetite signals some time. If you are willing to sit for 10 minutes with your feelings, you will know if you are truly hungry to fuel your body, or if you are just eating out of impulse cravings, and can use a healthier coping alternative.
Avoid eating with distractions such as the television, phones, or in your car. Don’t rush through your meal, rather slow down and enjoy smaller bites. Try putting your cutlery down between each bite if that helps. Slowing down will allow hunger signals to reach your brain before you overeat. After you’ve finished eating, wait 15 minutes before you get seconds or dessert and really assess if you’re still hungry. And despite what you may have been told, you do not have to clear your plate.
GRAB YOUR FREE 30 DAY JOURNAL PROMPTS FOR EMOTIONAL EATING ON KETO BELOW!
6) Eat A Healthy Keto Diet
If you struggle with emotional eating it may be difficult to distinguish between true hunger and perceived hunger. Making sure your diet is full of nutrients that your body requires to feel it’s best is key to overcoming emotional eating. The ketogenic diet is an incredible tool to help you along this journey. Many other diets often leave you feeling hungry and miserable all the time, which only triggers cravings, overeating, and binges. Keto focuses on high fat, and lots of protein which helps you feel full and satisfied for longer. Keto has been shown to suppress appetite and hunger, while decreasing the intensity of cravings that trigger emotional eating.
A diet that is high in carbohydrates or sugars also has a huge effect on our appetite hormones such as insulin, leptin and ghrelin which have a direct impact on our blood sugars. After eating carbs our blood sugar spikes, then eventually crashes and the constant fluctuations cause us to crave even more food, even if we’ve just eaten. Keto helps keep these hormones and our blood sugar stabilized. This allows us a unique opportunity to TRULY understand our physical hunger cues, and develop more awareness for when we’re actually hungry.
7) Seek Support
When we are experiencing negative emotions we often isolate ourselves away from others, and our loved ones. We feel like they may judge us, they may not understand, or we feel like a burden, so we just keep our feelings to ourselves.
In doing so, we turn to emotional eating as a way to cope, then feel intense amounts of shame and guilt afterwards. Emotional eating tends to occur behind closed doors. When no one else is around. When no one else can see you. We do it in secret because of the shame and disappointment we know we will feel, and want to spare ourselves the embarrassment of doing it in front of others. But that cycle can end if you are willing to face your feelings head-on, and share what you’re going through with others. Find an accountability buddy that truly understands, and lean on them when you feel an urge to emotionally eat. If you don’t want to discuss this with friends or family, consider hiring a coach to help support you.
If you’re tired of emotional eating derailing all your weight loss progress, click here to learn more about how I can help you to overcome this obstacle. We can identify what’s really going on, get to the root cause of what’s triggering your emotional eating, and develop healthier coping mechanisms that work for you. Together we can develop healthier eating habits, and a better understanding of yourself to give you peace of mind, and the keto weight loss results you deserve. You can also join the free Keto Weight Loss for Women facebook group full of supportive women from around the world!
