Distorted thinking: The cognitive roots of emotional eating

While the table above describes very common emotions associated with eating, your experience may not perfectly fit into any of these categories. Your eating may be triggered by emotions outside this list, such as guilt or shame, or a mixture of several emotions.

For example, Betsy is clearly angry with Paul because of his controlling nature. She feels it's unfair that he asks her to do things, and thus retaliates by eating forbidden foods, gaining weight simply to teach him a lesson. Besides anger, she also experiences sorrow. Growing up in a traditional family, Betsy knows that a good girl shouldn't be enraged, and therefore goes to great lengths to avoid showing anger. So, in addition to being angry with Paul, she is also sorrowful because she fears that if she lets herself become angry, something bad will happen. Her eating both reduces her anger and soothes her sorrow. Similarly, you can find examples of more than one emotion.

Alternatively, you might find that none of the terms described in Table 4.1 apply to you. You know you're producing a certain sensation before you eat, but you can't be sure what that sensation is.

Difficulty identifying one's emotional state is very common, especially for men who rarely talk about their emotions. If you have trouble pinpointing the emotions that trigger eating, write down your thoughts and revisit them later. If you're thinking, "Where did I put the peanut butter?" try to recall what you were thinking before you desperately craved the snack. Compare your thoughts to the mental states in column four of Table 4.1. They won't necessarily be the same, but you may find that the themes of your thoughts match one or more of the mental states.

For example, if you have negative thoughts about yourself, you're likely to feel frustrated. If you're worried that something difficult or unpleasant will happen, you're likely to feel anxious.

Now, review your emotional eating log from the past week and see which types of emotions most easily trigger eating. Once you know the types of emotions that trigger eating, you can use cognitive therapy to manage them. Refer to your cards and use your notebook to answer the following questions. This will be a summary of your emotional eating.

1. When am I most likely to eat due to emotional triggers?

2. Where do I most easily experience emotional eating?

3. If there are people around me before or during my emotional eating, who are they most likely to be?

4. Which of the foods I eat are most easily affected by my emotions?

5. What emotions or thoughts easily trigger eating?

Once you've completed the necessary activities to control emotional eating, you need to review your emotional eating log. If you read this a long time ago but haven't recorded your emotional eating for a week, just continue recording next week. Don't skip this exercise just because you understand the principle. Emotional eating doesn't always take obvious forms.

Rosemary, a member of one of my groups, objected to the assignment because she had been undergoing therapy for self-control for several years. She felt she knew her psychological makeup and knew she would eat when stressed. To appease me, she reluctantly agreed to do the assignment anyway. At the second meeting, she said that in addition to stress-induced eating, she found herself eating after talking to her mother, especially when her mother offered advice. As we discussed this type of eating, it became clear that her mother's well-intentioned advice angered her, and she needed to suppress that feeling through eating. She would never have made this connection without an emotional eating log.

Foolish idea

When we have negative emotions, we naturally look for reasons outside ourselves. You feel stressed because all your work needs to be finished by Friday. You feel depressed because your partner has cut ties with you. You feel angry because a stupid telemarketer interrupts you while you're cooking, burning the rice. But these mood changes aren't actually caused by external factors; they originate from within yourself. It's like that little ad plastered on your car bumper that blatantly proclaims, "You're unlucky." But when it happens, you don't need to become anxious, depressed, angry, or stressed, and then eat to alleviate the mood swings.

No one will advise you to completely ignore unpleasant things in your life. But how you deal with these things will determine the type and intensity of your emotions. It's natural to feel sad about the loss after a divorce or the end of a romantic relationship, but if you believe you are unworthy of love or have some other permanent flaw that will prevent you from ever finding someone else who loves you, you will fall into a more general depression. It is negative thoughts that cause depression, not the external events that trigger those thoughts.

Cognitive therapy, developed by Drs. Saron Beck and Albert Ellis, offers a way to change your mindset so that you don't feel so miserable when bad things happen. Its basic premise is that you can recognize some of your unthinking thoughts that contain irrational elements. Once you recognize that some thoughts are irrational, you can replace them with more rational ones, feel better, and experience a reduced need to eat. For a more detailed understanding of cognitive therapy, please read *The Good Mood Handbook* by Dr. David Burns.

Alice's Emotional Eating

Alice is a 46-year-old single mother of two and a highly successful sales specialist. Besides earning a six-figure income, her work is recognized locally and featured in a national business publication. Despite this success, Alice is unhappy, primarily because she weighs 244 pounds. She is also unhappy because she feels she is not a good mother. Before she gained weight, she had an affair with a married man.

I asked her to record her emotional eating over the course of a week. At our next meeting, she reported that most of her emotional eating occurred after putting the children to bed at night. Looking at the definitions in Table 4.1, she identified loneliness as the primary emotion driving her eating, accompanied by some sadness.