Using food as a source of comfort is something most people struggle with at some point in their lives. Emotional eating is also something we don’t like to discuss (Politics, Religion, and Eating Habits, right?).
Emotional eating is personal, and for some it’s painful, but it doesn’t have to be this way! There are strategies to work through it.
Start by trying to be most aware during your “trigger” times. The most common emotional eating times are mid-to-late afternoon, and after 8 PM. With this awareness, you can apply this DO HALT strategy:
During periods of stress, trigger times, or emotional urges, before you reach for food stop and ask yourself:
Am I Dehydrated?
Am I Overwhelmed?
Am I Hungry?
Am I Angry?
Am I Lonely?
Am I Tired?
This is the DO HALT method, and it works by improving awareness of what you actually need in that moment.
Here’s the breakdown:
Thirst or dehydration can trigger hunger and food cravings even if it’s water that your body is actually seeking. Any time a food craving strikes, drink a big glass of water first.
Then give yourself a few minutes before deciding whether you actually need food. Thirst, fatigue, and hunger sensations can sometimes be difficult to distinguish, particularly when you’re busy and haven’t been paying much attention to your body’s signals.
This doesn’t mean that drinking water magically makes a genuine craving disappear. Think of the glass of water as a quick diagnostic tool: hydrate first, pause, and then reassess. If you’re still physically hungry, eat. If the craving fades, thirst may have been part of the problem.
Practical tool: Keep a water bottle where you can see it. Waiting until you’re noticeably thirsty makes hydration something you have to remember. Keeping water visible turns drinking it into a visual reminder.
Emotional eating is using food to cover up uncomfortable emotions. Overwhelm is probably the most common negative feeling I run up against with clients. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, what you’re probably seeking is peacefulness, or a feeling of being in control. Food can’t give you that.
Stress and overwhelm can also make habitual behaviors more automatic. When your brain feels overloaded, you are less likely to carefully evaluate every decision and more likely to fall back on familiar routines. If “I’m stressed, so I deserve something sweet” has become one of those routines, the craving can appear almost automatically.
Instead of immediately trying to make the uncomfortable feeling disappear, identify exactly what is making you feel overloaded. Then ask yourself, “What is one thing I can do right now that would make this situation 10 percent better?”
Write down your next step, make the phone call you’ve been avoiding, clean up one small area, take a five-minute walk, or simply sit quietly and breathe for a few minutes. You don’t have to solve the entire problem. You just need to regain a little sense of control.
Practical tool: Before eating, write down what you’re overwhelmed about. Putting the problem into words forces you to deal with the actual source of discomfort instead of automatically trying to change your emotional state with food.
Emotional eating commonly occurs in response to stress and other uncomfortable emotions, and strategies such as identifying triggers, checking whether hunger is physical, managing stress, and substituting another behavior can help interrupt that pattern.
Physical hunger hits below the neck, builds gradually, is easily satisfied, and energizes you. Emotional hunger hits above the neck, has a sudden onset, is not easily satisfied, and leaves you feeling tired, sluggish, and often guilty. If you’re unsure what kind of hunger you’re experiencing, ask yourself where you feel it in your body, and eat a healthy snack or a few bites of the food you crave. See what you feel like 20 minutes afterwards. If you feel satisfied, you were likely experiencing physical hunger. If the craving strengthens, or now you want something else, it’s probably emotional hunger.
Another useful question is, “Would I eat something nutritious right now?” Genuine hunger usually creates some flexibility about what will satisfy you. A craving is often much more specific: “I don’t want a salad – I want ice cream.” The more specific and urgent the demand, the more worthwhile it is to stop and examine what is driving it.
Don’t make the mistake of trying to prevent sugar cravings by simply eating less food. Going too long without eating can turn mild hunger into an urgent search for the fastest, easiest source of calories available.
Regular meals that include satisfying foods can make cravings much easier to manage. Protein, high-fiber foods such as vegetables, fruit, beans and whole grains, and some healthy fat help meals provide greater staying power than meals built primarily around refined carbohydrates.
Practical tool: If you regularly get powerful cravings at roughly the same time every day, look backward several hours. Your problem may have started with an inadequate breakfast or lunch rather than with a lack of discipline at 4:00 in the afternoon.
Before you eat anything, identify honestly
Once you’re clear and honest, then find a different outlet for your angry energy: Run, do some pushups or jumping jacks, climb stairs, or get on a bicycle or elliptical. Need to settle down instead? Meditate, write, do some breathing practice, or read something relaxing.
Anger creates both mental and physical activation. Your heart rate may increase, your muscles tense, and your thoughts can become repetitive. Eating can temporarily distract you from all of that, which is one reason it can become an attractive coping mechanism.
But distraction and resolution are two different things. The food may change how you feel for ten minutes, but the person, conversation, frustration, or problem that made you angry is still there when you’re finished eating.
First decide what your body actually needs. Sometimes you need to discharge energy. Other times you need to reduce stimulation and calm yourself down.
Practical tool: Give yourself ten minutes before eating. Choose either an active strategy or a calming strategy during those ten minutes. Then reassess the craving instead of assuming that you have to obey it.
Also look for recurring patterns. If the same person, situation, or unresolved issue repeatedly sends you to the pantry, the long-term solution probably isn’t better snack control. It may involve boundaries, communication, problem solving, or changing how you respond to that situation.
Call a friend, take a walk outside, or invite someone over! If you feel like you have nobody to talk to, join a book club, fitness class, volunteer group, or consider getting a pet. Pets are not only great companions, but they lead to increased interaction, get you out of the house, and provide common ground to spark conversations.
Loneliness is especially likely to trigger eating when food has become associated with comfort, entertainment, reward, or companionship. This can be particularly noticeable at night, when the day’s activity stops and there are fewer distractions.
The important distinction is that loneliness is asking for connection, not calories. Eating may briefly occupy your attention, but it doesn’t satisfy the underlying need.
You also don’t necessarily need a deep heart-to-heart conversation every time you feel lonely. Small amounts of social contact matter. Talk to a neighbor. Go somewhere other people are present. Take a group exercise class. Call a family member. Volunteer. Walk your dog somewhere you regularly encounter other people.
Practical tool: Make a short “connection list” before you need it. Write down three people you can call or text and three places or activities that put you around other people. When loneliness triggers a craving, choose something from the list instead of trying to invent a solution while you’re already feeling low.
Lack of social support is also recognized as one factor that can make emotional eating more difficult to control, which is why deliberately building connection can be an important part of changing the eating pattern.
Fatigue and under-sleeping will really turn on the food cravings. Practice good sleep hygiene (like going to bed at a regular time, and staying away from screen time 2 hours before bedtime). Be sure to eat regularly enough throughout the day — if your blood sugar drops too low, it will cause your energy to crash and your food cravings to surface.
This is one of the places where physiology really does work against willpower. Sleep restriction can increase hunger and the desire for highly rewarding, calorie-dense foods. Research has also found changes in appetite regulation and food-related decision making after inadequate sleep.
That helps explain a familiar experience: after a good night’s sleep, a normal meal may sound perfectly satisfying. After five hours of sleep, suddenly donuts, cookies, and oversized portions look much more appealing.
Trying to repeatedly overpower this biological signal with discipline is a difficult strategy. Sometimes the best craving-control technique is simply getting more sleep.
Also notice the difference between hunger and an attempt to manufacture energy. When you’re exhausted in the afternoon, your brain may be asking for a rapid pick-me-up rather than food because you’re actually hungry. Sugar can temporarily provide that stimulation, but it doesn’t solve the underlying fatigue.
Practical tool: When a tired craving hits, ask, “Do I need food, or do I need energy?” If you are hungry, eat something substantial. If you aren’t, try water, a short walk outside, some light movement, a brief rest, or an earlier bedtime that night.
Most importantly, don’t treat sleep as completely separate from nutrition. If controlling sugar becomes dramatically harder every time you undersleep, improving your sleep routine is part of your nutrition strategy, too.
If you want help with emotional eating, contact Dan DeFigio to discuss coaching options. And pick up 3 Steps To Kill Your Sugar Cravings for free!