How Do Emotions Trigger Cravings and Emotional Eating?

As odd as it might sound, for most people losing weight is not really about the food, and it’s definitely not about going on a diet. Coming from a registered dietitian, this might sound surprising, but my decades of experience in helping people lose weight and keep it off have proven it true time and time again.

Most people know what they should be eating but they’re just not able to do it. I can’t even begin to tell you how many patients and clients I’ve counseled over the years, giving the best nutrition advice possible, and they weren’t able to follow “the plan.”

And my clients are smart people! They know that refined carbs and processed junk foods aren’t good for their bodies and that eating these foods won’t help them reach their weight loss goals.

And I knew this too. But it didn’t help.

My Own Experience with Food

When I was feeling neglected, I ate boxes of cookies and frozen waffles with butter and powdered sugar. When I was anxious or overwhelmed, I ate huge bowls of popcorn and bags of corn chips. When I was sad or lonely, I secretly ate ice cream and chocolate after everyone went to bed.

Of course, I knew better, but that didn’t matter. I couldn’t help myself. I felt powerless over food.

And to make things worse, I’m a dietitian, specializing in helping people lose weight. I felt like a fraud.

It wasn’t until I started looking at WHY I was eating – and overeating – that I discovered what was going on.

My emotions were triggering my cravings and emotional eating!

What Happens When We Experience Emotions?

Our emotions don’t come out of nowhere. They are generated by our bodies based on what we are experiencing in any particular moment. For example, you may experience happiness when something good happens in your life and fear when you are feeling threatened or in danger.

The information stored in our bodies and minds from past experiences also influences what emotions we create and make us more reactive to that emotion in the future.

Ideally, three things happen when we experience an emotion:

1) Our body generates the emotional vibration;

2) We feel the emotion and any thoughts or physical sensations that come with it; and

3) We process the emotion and let it go.

But if we don’t allow ourselves to feel the emotion or if we don’t process it and let it go, the energy of that emotion becomes stuck, or trapped, in our bodies. This is often described as our emotional baggage. Instead of moving beyond your feelings of anger or grief (or whatever emotion you’re feeling), you hold this negative emotional energy in your body.

How Do Emotions Trigger Cravings and Emotional Eating?

It’s this negative, emotional energy that can trigger cravings and emotional eating along with other physical, mental, or emotional issues.

For example, let’s say you came home to an empty house each day after school, and you were lonely and sad. It’s unlikely that you knew how to process these emotions and let them go, so they got stored in your body and made you feel not so great.

The next thing you know, you’re raiding the cookie jar, and you start to feel better. Now your body is generating emotions like happiness and joy, and of course this feels much better than loneliness and sadness. In addition, the sugar from the cookies is spiking your serotonin and dopamine, which causes you to feel even better!

And thus, the cycle begins. Your body has learned that food soothes those negative emotions and makes you feel better.

And because those negative emotions of loneliness and sadness are still trapped in your body, when you feel those emotions in the future (as an adult), you’re triggered to soothe yourself with food, again and again. What makes this cycle even harder to break is that each time you use food to soothe your emotions, you’re reinforcing that pathway in your brain, making it stronger and stronger.

The solution is to deal with the underlying cause of the problem (the trapped emotions) instead of self-medicating with food.

Here Are 4 Steps You Can Take to Get Started

Step 1: Journal About Your Emotions

Identify the emotions that are triggering your cravings and emotions by journaling. Set aside some quiet time to reflect on what emotional states trigger your eating habits. Some common ones are lonely, sad, anxious, unworthy, and frustrated.

Step 2: Go Deep and Trust Your Intuition

Maybe you find yourself binge eating when a friend cancels your plans at the last minute. Notice how this feels in your body. Perhaps you feel a nauseous feeling in your gut, and this reminds you of the time when you were a teenager and your best friend ditched you and you felt abandoned. In this case, the trapped emotion is abandonment.

Step 3: Release the Trapped Emotion from Your Body

Take a deep breath in, and on the exhale say, “I’m releasing this trapped emotion of ____________.” You can also try visualizing releasing this energy from your body.

Step 4: Try Emotional Freedom Techniques

Consider energy healing techniques like EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques). This is one of the techniques I teach my clients to use because it’s so fast and effective for releasing the emotional baggage we’ve accumulated over the years. We also use other energy healing techniques as well like The Emotion Code and Psych-K.

Conquering Your Emotional Eating Is Possible

Identifying and releasing the trapped emotions in your body can play a big role in reducing or eliminating your cravings and emotional eating.

If you’d like to learn more, I warmly invite you to watch my free training: How to Stop Cravings and Emotional Eating So You Can Lose the Weight and Keep It Off. At the end of the training, I offer a free consultation to talk about your situation and explore how I might help.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Have you tried to identify the emotions that trigger your eating habits? What are they and what do you do to battle them?