Natural News, a site about Natural Health, Natural Living and news has an interview entitled “Stop Your Food Cravings Before They Start“. In the interview, Jonny Bowden (author, nutritionist, and personal trainer) talks about emotional eating with Kevin Gianni. An excerpt from the interview:

Kevin: Wow. So let’s get right into it. I sense a theme of the questions that we got and I got a chance to take a look at them, kind of revolve around to very specific things. One is emotional eating and the other is sugar cravings and I have a feeling that they’re a little bit connected, but I’m going to let you talk about that. So let’s talk first about emotional eating. How can someone overcome emotional-type grabbing for food no matter what it is?

Jonny: Well, it’s certainly something that we can spend an entire hour on, but let me just give you a tiny piece of the way I approach it. I did a program a while ago, which has been doing really well on my website called the Diet Boot Camp Program. It’s four CDs and a manual and it’s the text that we use in our private coaching program. It’s kind of a textbook, but this is an at-home version that you can do without the coaching program and everyone talks about using a food journal to keep a record of what you eat, so that you can kind of monitor food reactions and calories and be accountable to yourself. In the Diet Boot Camp Program, I particularly added to that food journal questions about what you just asked. “What am I feeling when I’m eating this?” “Am I really hungry or is something else going on?” “How do I connect the dots between the triggers for eating and my eating behavior?” Because I think the answer to your question is really about how we connect the dots? How do we identify what triggers happen often subconsciously, and often without us even noticing them. They happen so quickly.

What cues do we respond to that trigger eating behaviors, because until we can make that connection we can’t break the link. So what we’re looking for is a circuit breaker. We’re looking for a way — if you know those Christmas lights that you have that you put on a Christmas tree. When they’re all kind of chained together and there’s one little circuit that’s broken in there then all the rest of the lights beyond that don’t light up. That’s what we need to do with some of our more addictive behaviors, whether it be food behaviors or drug behaviors, whatever we’re addicted to and here we’re talking about sugar and cravings and emotional eating.

So what we tend to do… and I was a cigarette smoker, for example. Certain subjects would come up. Certain anxiety producing subjects would come up in conversation. You automatically reach for the pack. So what I talk about on Diet Boot Camp is making a chink in the link. You’re looking at that link of behaviors that starts with an emotion of feeling of fear or anger. In the 12 step program they talk about ‘don’t get too angry or too tired or too thirsty or too hungry or too lonely’. There are these triggers and what we’re looking for is ‘what is the link of behaviors that ends with us eating something that doesn’t support our health and how do we break that link? How do we put a little circuit breaker in that link of lights’ and I think that’s the key to getting mastery over emotional eating.

Check out the rest of the interview here.

Emotional Overeating, in a general sense, occurs when people make food choices based on emotional reactions. Emotional eating happens when we use food as a solution to our feelings. Think of any emotional state, and you’ll soon be able to associate a food with it. You’re bored? Why not polish off the ice cream in the fridge? Stressed? Might as well have a few chips to take your mind off your problems. As soon as you give in to a food craving, it’s easy to take your mind off of the cause of your emotional state.

The problem with using food to manage mood is that it becomes a self-reinforcing habit. You eat because you feel bad about yourself, then feel bad about yourself because you overeat. 

To gain a better understanding of what emotional overeating is, and who emotional eaters are, we spoke with Dr. Denise Lamothe, clinical psychologist and doctor of holistic health. She is the founder of Emotional Overeating Awareness Month, author of the popular book, The Taming of the Chew (Penguin 2002) and an international professional speaker:

An emotional eater is (generally) someone who uses food as a way to cope with difficult feelings — sadness, anxiety, boredom, disappointment, etc.  She is likely to have rigid, self-perfectionistic expectations and a negative self-image.  Her self-esteem fluctuates but when she overeats, she feel badly about herself and her behavior and she is likely to punish herself and feel angry at herself often leading to depression.  After overeating and beating herself up she will usually feel helpless to change.  These painful feelings can easily lead her to overeat again in order to feel better.  She usually feels unable to control her eating once she gets started.  She may temporarily feel better by convincing herself that she will start taking care of herself next Monday, after she finishes a project, once she learns how to “fix” her relationship or something like that.  Her plan usually fails of course, leading to more discouragement, frustration and anger which then can lead her back to sugars and/or simple carbohydrates for relief — indeed a vicious cycle.  This is generally a pattern that she has repeated multiple times throughout her life and she may or may not be aware of it.   

This blog is dedicated to helping people overcome the perpetual cycle of emotional overeating.

Welcome to EmotionalEatingHelp.org, a site devoted to helping people understand, treat, and overcome emotional overeating. This blog will be a resource for people looking to find out more about emotional eating and will offer tips and news on:

• Techniques to avoid emotional overeating
• Interviews with experts
• Advice on how to overcome emotional overeating
• Healthy alternatives to bad food
• Coping with emotional overeating
• The psychology of overeating
• Products to help emotional overeaters
• Weight loss strategies
• Mental fitness information

This blog is sponsored by Bach Original Flower Remedies, makers of the Emotional Eating Support Kit. More information on Bach’s Emotional Eating Support products is available here.