Episode 21: Emotional Eating Series - Your Stress Level

High stress levels can increase your tendency to emotionally eat. However, not everyone who is stressed turns to emotional eating. This episode reviews 3 evidence-based skills that can help reduce emotional eating when you’re stressed.

This is Part 1 of a 5-part series on emotional eating.

Episode Transcript:

High stress is connected to emotional eating. However, if you build awareness, you stay in touch with your hunger and fullness, and you actively use stress management skills, that can help you to decrease the emotional eating.

INTRO MUSIC: Welcome to The Compassionate Wellness Podcast. I'm Alex Treanor. I'm a Nationally Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, and I am so excited you're here. The wellness industry is full of do's and do not's, should's and should not's. But I like to take a different approach. I'll be sharing all things health and wellness from a joyful, real-life compassionate perspective. If you're ready to drop the cookie-cutter approach and create a life you truly love, while eating a cookie or two along the way, let's dive in.

Hi, Friends! Welcome to the podcast this week. Today we are talking about emotional eating. I'm going to be doing a whole series on emotional eating, so this is the first of five episodes that I have planned on this topic.

I am super passionate about this topic. In my 9 years of coaching experience, emotional eating is hands down the most common concern of my clients. I would bet that it's over 90% of my clients have said that they want to figure out emotional eating; they want to better understand it and they want to figure out ways to overcome it. And it's hard, right? It's hard because it's so interconnected with different aspects of our life. It's a complex behavior and so it feels really big. The visual I have is just this rat's nest of webs of knots and rope and junk and stuff, right? And so when you're wanting to unravel that, and make sense of it, where do you start? It's hard to figure out. It feels daunting, it feels overwhelming. And that's very valid when it comes to emotional eating.

When I was in my master's program, one of my goals was to start to figure out this web of emotional eating. Every project that we did, every research assignment, every paper that we had to write where we could choose our own topic, which luckily was the majority of our assignments, I chose emotional eating. Going through the research on emotional eating, understanding what we know what we don't know, it makes it even more complex. You really see the intricacies and how entangled it can all be. But through this research, there were several themes that did emerge.

So the goal that I have for this series of episodes is to break down emotional eating into something a little bit more manageable, and to hopefully inspire you towards some clarity on understanding your own tendencies, and where you can start making some changes that feel productive for you.

In behavior change theory, we have a concept called self-efficacy, which is essentially your belief in your ability to change your behavior. What the theory tells us is that if your self-efficacy is low, if you don't feel confident in your ability to make a change, the likelihood of that change happening is also incredibly low. If it doesn't feel possible, or it feels so complicated, why bother? So for these episodes, I want to give you ideas on what concrete skills you can work on that will help you to feel more confident managing emotional eating.

Over these next five weeks, we're going to dive into five different correlates of emotional eating. These are things that the research have really shown to be connected to emotional eating, not necessarily a cause. We're not saying that the things we'll talk about over these next five episodes cause you to emotionally eat, but they are connected. There's some kind of relationship between them.

Before we dive in with today's correlate, I want to level set on what we're talking about and how the research actually defines emotional eating. I think all of us have this idea of what it means for ourselves, but I want to clarify what the research shows what we're talking about in terms of emotional eating throughout these next five episodes. Emotional eating is defined as eating in response to a negative emotion. We know there are reasons that we eat for positive emotions as well. We celebrate. We are joyful. Those things can lead us to eat. That's not what we're talking about in this circumstance. These negative emotions are going to be stress, maybe anxiety, frustration, anger.

We also typically hear emotional eating talked about in a negative aspect; that it's a problem or not helpful. I just want to clarify that it's not inherently a bad thing. Eating in itself is emotional, right? Food is not just fuel. As much as we want to believe that we can just fuel our bodies and eliminate all other distractions, that's not how it works. Food is very cultural. It's very symbolic. It's how we form relationships with others. It's how we show care and love and sympathy and concern for others. It's really tied into an emotional component. So how do we know when emotional eating is a problem versus not a problem? What we're looking for here is the conscious awareness. So if you have a bad day, and you want a piece of chocolate, and you come home, and you look in your cabinet, and there's a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup sitting there. You open it up, and you enjoy that Reese's, and you feel comforted, and you're like, "dang, that was so good", and you move on with your day...it's not a problem, that's fine. That's a mindful way to emotionally eat. On the other hand, if you have a bad day, and you come in the door, and you throw open your cabinet, and you're looking, and you don't even know what you see, but 10 minutes later, there's 14 Reese's wrappers on the table, and you didn't get any enjoyment or comfort out of it, you just numb to yourself, you distract yourself from reality, that's where it becomes more problematic.

The correlate that I want to dive into first, today, is very foundational. It is your perceived stress level. Totally makes sense, right? The way that you feel, your emotion, the stress that you're feeling is related to your likelihood to emotionally eat. We're going to be discussing three different studies today, all of these will be linked in the show notes for you. So if you want to read the articles, if you want to review them, they are all there for you.

In each of the three studies that we're looking at today, they surveyed individuals and asked about their stress level, their emotional eating tendencies, their food intake, and various other factors. They were really trying to get a holistic look. Their findings showed that individuals with a higher perceived stress level also report higher amounts of emotional eating. That makes sense, right? Higher emotion, higher emotional eating. However, it wasn't 100% correlation. It wasn't a super strong connection that tells us anytime that you feel stressed, you're going to emotionally eat. And we know that not everyone who feels stress, also emotionally eats. So there's got to be other factors in play.

So what they did is look through all these different surveys to see what are some of these additional factors that mediate the relationship between having a high stress level and the likelihood of turning to emotional eating? They found three factors that we'll be talking about today.

Those factors are:

• First being able to regulate your eating.

• Second, using internal body cues, things like your hunger, your fullness, your satiety to help you make choices about your food.

• And the third thing was having productive stress management skills.

So if we take those three things, and we're going to put them in essentially a theory. We're going to use an if-then statement to give us a roadmap so that we can start to understand what this looks like.

So our first if then statement is:

If you have a high stress level, but you are really good at staying present and aware around food, you feel really confident setting and sticking with goals, you maybe have a tracking method that helps you stay aware or present when you're eating, something that helps you with regulating your own eating behavior, you are then less likely to emotionally eat.

Our next statement is that if you have a high stress level, but you're really good at paying attention to your internal cues. You know what hunger feels like, and you know how to honor that hunger. You know what fullness feels like and you know how to honor that fullness. And you know, when you feel satisfied with your meal, then you're less likely to emotionally eat.

And the third one, if you have a high stress level, but you have a lot of healthy coping stress management skills, you know how to deep breathe, you know how to journal, you know how to use your support and your resources, you go for walks, you take a nap, whatever it might be, you have the skills to cope with that stress, then you're less likely to emotionally eat.

So in terms of actionable steps, what we can pull from that, that we can work on to help us reduce emotional eating, when we feel stressed. The three skills would be:

1. Building awareness with ourselves, learning how to check in. Maybe that's some kind of monitoring device like a food journal, a habit tracker, maybe that setting goals and checking in on your progress, but something that builds awareness around your food.

2. The second skill is getting in touch with your hunger, your fullness and your satisfaction. Learning what those cues feel like maybe writing them out on the hunger fullness scale writing out like "okay, before this meal, I'm at a three, I'm pretty hungry. And after this meal, I'm at a give I'm content," using those tools can be helpful.

3. And the third skill we can practice is having our toolbox of stress management skills, making a list maybe even writing it out so that you know what are the skills I can turn to when I'm feeling stressed.

For each of these three skills, there's a lot of ways to approach them. What comes to my mind is probably not a surprise at this point. Mindfulness is what I hear in those three skills. Because mindfulness helps us to increase that awareness in a nonjudgmental way. That's what mindfulness is, it is bringing nonjudgmental awareness to the present moment, which is essentially what those three skills are telling us.

Mindfulness is all about building awareness and staying present that first skill we need. Mindful eating is all about getting in tune with your body, those internal signals, the hunger and fullness. That's a core component of mindful eating; starting to be present in our body through the eating process. And mindfulness is well known for helping with stress management, whether that's a mindful meditation, going for a mindful walk, practicing mindful eating, slowing down, noticing the taste, the textures, the temperature, the smells, the sights, all of those things, better food help us to reduce stress.

So mindfulness can be a key part in mediating this relationship between a high stress level and a likelihood of emotional eating.

Alright, so if we boil it down to one sentence, one main takeaway, high stress is connected to emotional eating. However, if you build awareness, you stay in touch with your hunger and fullness, and you actively use stress management skills that can help you to decrease the emotional eating.

So the question I would have you consider is when you feel high-stress, what will most help you to stay present and connected with yourself? And what tools are in your toolbox for managing stress?

If you need ideas on tools, if you're not sure about stress management, if that's a new thing to the consider of how do I actively manage stress, episodes 8-11 of this podcast were all about stress. And I would specifically recommend episodes 9 and 10, which talks about different coping skills and mindfulness and how that can help with stress management as well.

So as you ponder on this question, and come up with some ideas of things that help you to be present, to be aware, to be in tune with yourself and manage your stress, I also want to encourage you to start practicing those skills regularly. The time to start practicing them is not when you have had a high-stress day. The time to start practicing them is when it's a low stakes endeavor, right? It's a low-stress day, it's a good opportunity to try something new, you're in a good mindset. That's when we practice doing this. That's when we practice mindful eating and practice managing our stress and do a meditation.

You don't start practicing for the Olympics, when you show up for the Olympics. The hope is that you have already done the training. You already know what you're doing, so that it comes natural to you and you can perform at your best in the high-stakes moment. Same idea here we practice stress management. When we're not feeling stressed. We practice mindful eating, when we're not feeling like we need to emotionally eat because then when it is high-stress, and we do want to eat all those Reese's in the cabinet. We have these tools already in our pocket to pull out and it's a lot easier to incorporate them.

I am super excited to dive into this topic more with you. This is a topic I'm super passionate about because I know how impactful it is. I know the research is complex and I know that it's hard to know where to start and it feels so all-consuming. I'm aiming to keep these episodes short, sweet, actionable and give you some ideas to put into practice now that can hopefully help you to feel better in the future.

That's what I have for you today. I hope you have a wonderful week and I look forward to talking with you again next week!

OUTRO MUSIC: Thanks for joining me on this episode of the compassionate wellness podcast. If this message resonated with you, please share it with someone you care about. I'd love to connect with you as well follow me on Instagram @alextreanor.coaching, or visit my website alextreanorcoaching.com. And as a reminder, Treanor spelled kind of goofy, it's T-R-E-A-N-O-R. For any references mentioned in this episode, be sure to check out the show notes. I hope you have a wonderful day and don't forget to make time for something you enjoy.

References:

1. Ling, J., & Zahry, N.R. (2021). Relationships among perceived stress, emotional eating, and dietary intake in college students: Eating self-regulation as a mediator. Appetite, 163, 105215.

2. Tan, C.C., & Chow, C.M. (2014). Stress and emotional eating: The mediating role of eating dysregulation. Personality and Individual Differences, 66, 1-4.

3. Wilson, S.M., Darling, K.E., Fahrenkamp, A.J., D’Auria, A.L., & Sato, A.F. (2015). Predictors of emotional eating during adolescents’ transition to college: Does body mass index moderate the association between stress and emotional eating. Journal of American College Health, 63(3), 163-170.