How can I stop using food to cope with negative emotions?

Understanding emotional eating, its impact on mental health, and strategies for developing a healthy relationship with food and emotions.

Have you ever noticed changes in your eating habits when you are sad, bored or anxious? Many people report eating either more, or less, as a way of helping them to cope when they experience difficult emotions.

Although this is a very normal response, it can take the pleasure out of eating, and can become distressing and bring about other feelings of shame and self-criticism.

Adding to the complexity of it all, we live in a world where diet culture is unavoidable, and our relationship to eating, food and body image can become complicated and confusing.

“Emotional eating” refers to the eating behaviours (typically eating more) that occur in response to difficult emotions.

Research shows around 20 per cent of people regularly engage in emotional eating, with a higher prevalence among adolescents and women. In a study of more than 1,500 adolescents, 34 per cent engaged in emotional eating while sad and 40 per cent did so while anxious.

Foods consumed are often fast-foods and other energy-dense, nutrient-poor convenience foods.

For some people, emotional eating was simply a habit formed earlier in life that has persisted over time.