Do you binge on a pizza, a burger, French fries, or any comfort food when you feel sad or stressed? If you are nodding yes to that, then you might be ’emotionally binge eating’. As the word suggests, emotional eating or stress eating is never about filling your stomach but about using food as a reward to regulate your emotions. With stress and anxiety affecting a large population globally, the distinction between physical hunger and emotional eating has become bleaker. A study titled ‘Psychological Determinants of Emotional Eating in Adolescence’, published in the National Library of Medicine cites relationship struggles, financial worries, work stress, and mental health issues like anxiety and depression as some of the reasons which are at the root of emotional binge eating.

Dr (Ph.D.) Syed Zafar Sultan Rizvi, assistant professor, Department of Psychology, SLA, Noida International University had earlier told indianexpress.com, “This type of (emotional) eating causes many problems that include obesity and sudden weight gain (due to unhealthy eating habits). Most of the research shows that 60 percent of overeating is due to emotional eating behaviour in which a person suffers from emotional imbalance or negativity that leads towards fulfilling activities like eating.”

Agreeing, Sumithra Sridhar, a counselling psychologist, said, “This is usually a distraction or a temporary solution that can cause an impulsive assumption that we are fine once we eat, but it just causes avoidance of the concern.”

Stressing the need to identify the cause of stress eating, she added that it is significant to understand the difference between emotional and physical hunger. “It is also significant to understand the difference between a craving and the need to stress eat. A lot of us have cravings for different reasons and it is temporary, but emotional eating is more than being temporary,” she added.

The impact and effects of stress eating 

*It can trigger a cycle that goes like this — trigger-stress-eating-temporary relief-trigger-stress-eating and so on.
*It can cause weight gain, and changes in the skin. These factors can further escalate stress.
* In some people, this can cause disordered eating patterns or even an eating disorder i.e bulimia.
* Over a period of time, the body can also build a tolerance to the food, so people can tend to eat more to stay temporarily satiated and this can lead to physical health concerns.

The good news is that there are ways to train your brain to eat healthy even while emotional binge eating, said Dr Sridhar as she listed some tips to do so.

*Substitute foods with alternatives; use Stevia instead of sugar while making/having juice or sweets.
*Understand your triggers for emotional eating. In case you stress eat because you are avoiding certain food groups in meals like potatoes or rice, then try to have a balanced meal instead of avoiding such foods at all.
*Fill up the bowl with chips + nuts instead of just chips. One can always ask someone else to make us these bowls.
* Buying chips or fast food one packet at a time, instead of in bulk.
* Making our own foods that we stress eat, like cheese sandwiches or making pakodas. This can make the process longer and can be used as a way to de-stress as well.
* Keep an accountability secret diary where you can make notes of what you ate and what made you eat it. This can be a journal that can be used to draw comparison between days and understand the frequency of triggers.

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