It's Okay to Eat Your Feelings

The world is experiencing a collective trauma right now. This global pandemic is affecting everyone’s mental health, and we all have our own personal coping mechanisms for the sadness, loneliness, anxiety, boredom, and disappointment we are experiencing. One common way of coping is emotional eating.

The Washington Post recently interviewed Kindful Body founder and certified Mindful Self-Compassion teacher Marcella Cox about emotional eating during the current health crisis. Here’s what she had to say:

“Eating food when we are emotionally dysregulated can calm us down or give us energy, and eating emotionally can help soothe and comfort, or even numb or distract ourselves.”

Unlike what diet culture would like you to believe, you don’t have to look for an alternate coping mechanism if you are emotionally eating during this time.

It’s a normal response to our emotions. Food is a comfort and you are not weak or “bad” for comforting yourself during this crisis. It is important to understand that stress-eating while staying at home much of the time does not mean you have an eating disorder. Binge eating disorder (BED) is the most common eating disorder in the United States, but emotional eating is not the same thing as binge eating.

People with binge eating disorder experience a loss of control when eating; when we “eat our feelings” we can usually stop whenever we want to. As binge eating disorder expert Amy Pershing explains, binge eating is a disorder about restriction and food obsession.

So if eating your favorite foods is your go-to form of self-soothing during this time, know that there is nothing wrong with you.

There are so many worse things you could be doing to your body to cope. Health experts warn of excessive drinking during this period of social isolation. Things like drugs, alcohol, and self-harm put you in actual danger. Cookies are relatively harmless. While things like alcohol can become addictive, desserts and salty snacks cannot.

You might be asking, “What if I gain weight?” You probably are fearing weight gain because you’ve been inundated with diet culture messages that gaining weight during this pandemic is “bad” and losing weight is “good.” These fat-phobic, toxic messages are especially triggering for someone with an eating disorder who struggles with anxiety and shame about eating and their body. 

Regardless of weight gained or not gained, everybody deserves respect. We all know that weight gain is not the worst thing that can happen during this pandemic.

When you beat yourself up for emotional eating, you’ll actually feel worse and do more damage to your body in the long run. Judging yourself and labeling yourself as a “bad” person for eating to cope with your feelings causes you to fall into a spiral of shame. You may start to restrict, leading you to become overly hungry, which in turn can lead to actual binge eating.

Emotional eating is actually one way to cope with your dysregulated nervous system. Using food to help you through this time is completely acceptable.

But there are other ways to cope with the myriad upsetting emotions you are experiencing right now, and as the Washington Post article explains, self-compassion can help.

Marcella states, “Practicing self-compassion allows us to enter a state in which our emotions and nervous system are regulated.”

She often teaches her clients the self-compassion break from the Mindful Self-Compassion program. The first part is becoming mindful of the negative emotion(s) and suffering we are experiencing rather than being over-identified (hyper-aroused) with it or numb to it (hypo-aroused). We bring a kind, non-judgmental, curiosity to our experience. 

The second part is to remind yourself that you aren’t alone in feeling the way that you do. Negative emotions are part of the human experience. This important element of common humanity (others struggle in the same way we do) helps us feel less isolated with our suffering. 

The third part is to be kind to yourself. Rather than judge ourselves, we then bring compassion to our experience by responding to ourselves with the same care, understanding, and reassurance we would give a loved one suffering in the same way.

Marcella encourages clients to put their hands over their hearts or cross their arms to give themselves a hug and tell themselves what they would tell a friend who was struggling in the same way. What’s important throughout this exercise is to talk to yourself the way you would talk to someone that you genuinely care about using a kind tone of voice. Research shows that soothing touch, gentle vocalizations, and warmth activate the mammalian caregiving part of our brain that helps regulate ourselves, just as these behaviors help regulate others when they are upset. 

So the next time you are upset or shut down, you can speak kindly to yourself, place your hands over your heart or other soothing gesture, and give yourself the emotional support you need. And just like when you do this for someone you love, you will be releasing the feel-good hormones of oxytocin and endorphins in your own system. 

From this regulated state, you can make decisions to meet your emotional needs in different ways, giving you the ability to make the choice on what you really need to calm and soothe yourself during this challenging time in our world.

To try self-compassion, you can visit the Kindful Body website, where you can sign up for three free daily self-compassion meditations.

If you are struggling with food or your body, we are here for you. Don’t hesitate to reach out for a free 15-minute consultation where we can find out how to best support you during this time. And don’t forget, when you are more compassionate toward yourself, it often increases your compassion for others, which is what our world needs more of to help us get through this world crisis.