Forget Emotional EatingThink Learned Eating
By: Warren Huberman, Ph.D.
Emotional Eating is one of the most common topics addressed with regards to weight loss surgery. Every weight loss surgery book, blog and website is full of articles explaining the causes of emotional eating and tips on how to defeat this dangerous villian that threatens to derail your success from surgery!
Hold onto your seat because Im going to try and convince you that Emotional Eating is an overused and incomplete expression to describe the very problem it is supposed to address. Im also going to provide you with a new way of thinking about your eating behavior and a methodology to change it so that you can have more success from weight loss surgery.
Emotional Eating is generally thought of as eating that occurs in response to a particular emotional state. The basic premise is that a particular emotional state somehow triggers undesired eating. Some people eat when theyre depressed, some when theyre nervous and others when theyre angry. Of course, others eat when theyre happy or in the mood to celebrate. In fact, virtually everyone on the planet does the latter. If humans didnt eat in response to positive emotions half of the restaurants around the world would close within the next few weeks. Thanksgiving would be cancelled and Christmas dinner would be no different than Tuesdays leftovers.
What about eating in response to negative emotionsis that fairly universal as well? I can confidently tell you that in working with thousands of people over the past 20 years, many of whom were NOT surgical weight loss patients, that almost everyone has used food on occasion to provide temporary relief from emotional distress. Im confident that this is true among the general population as well. In fact, many researchers believe that our brains are actually pre-wired to use food in this manner. Such researchers will tell you that drugs such as heroin, cocaine and others are actually hijacking the receptors and neural pathways that were designed for food! So there you have my first problem with the expression Emotional Eating.JUST ABOUT EVERYONE IS AN EMOTIONAL EATER TO SOME DEGREE, so labeling yourself an Emotional Eater is to state the obvious.
However, it is interesting that there is considerable variability in the behavior of those who describe themselves as emotional eaters. As I mentioned, some people eat in response to one emotion while others eat in response to other emotions. Some people eat in response to mild disappointment while others eat only when they feel really distressed. Why is this so? The reason for this and for a wide variety of eating behaviors is that most eating behavior is learned.
I will spare you an Introduction to Psychology class and try to minimize the psychobabble, but consider that when it comes to human behavior, we do what we do either because of our genetic endowment or what weve learned. Nature (genetic) or nurture (learning). Much of this learning isnt voluntary. In other words, most of your eating behaviors were not learned the way you would learn to play the piano. Much of what weve learned we picked up by watching others or by being instructed by others or through trial and error and the positive or negative consequences that followed.
Learning as it relates to food and eating begins on day one. Consider that at birth the behavior of a newborn is 100% genetic and 0% learning. Nothing has happened to the newborn child yet so they havent learned a thing. Nurture has yet to exert an influenceits all nature. Whatever a newborn does is pre-wired. But that changes almost immediately. Here comes the first bottleyum! Sweet sugary milk. Lesson one: Milk tastes good and feels good going down. Later that day the baby criesmommy rushes in with a bottle. Lesson number two has just occurred: I cry loud enough and mommy feeds me. I feel better and I stop screaming. Food is a reward and soothes my distressand I am now in complete control of mommy!!
Learned Eating quickly proceeds in leaps and bounds in childhood. Theres a very good chance (for example) that you learned to clean your plate because your mother told you that you had to and that you wouldnt be allowed to have dessert if you didnt. Or perhaps you received cookies as a reward for good report cards or for cleaning your room. Now as an adult, long after mom stopped giving cookies for good report cards, you continued the habit of rewarding yourself for your daily successes. I can think back to all of the times that I was offered chicken soup by my grandmother when I was disappointed for some reason or another as a kid. There is still no scientific evidence that chicken soup is effective in treating disappointment or depression, but the soothing taste of the soup sure does make you feel a little better. Even better, eating chicken soup today at age 41 provides me with warm memories of my grandmother. Starting to get the picture? From a young age, we quickly learn to like certain foods for certain reasons and develop eating habits and preferences almost completely without effort and often without any awareness.
By using the term Learned Eating you are more elegantly and accurately describing what is really going on here. The concept of learning better answers the questions of Why do I eat this way? and How did I develop these problematic eating patterns? Also, Learned Eating accounts for more of your eating behavior than just what is triggered by emotions. All of the behaviors that we commonly call habits are more accurately called learned behaviors. So Emotional Eating is just one of the many types of eating behaviors that youve picked up (learned) throughout your life.
The real #1 reason that Im trying to get your vote for Learned Eating is that this expression makes you empowered and able to change. Everyone is familiar with the concept of learning because we are all students in our own way. You dont need to be a psychologist to understand learning. Learned Eating is a simple concept: If you have learned maladaptive or destructive eating behaviors that have contributed to weight gain, you can also unlearn these behaviors and learn or relearn new ones that help you keep the weight off after surgery. Emotions are a whole other murky, mysterious matter. Many people feel confused by the concept of Emotional Eating. It doesnt empower you. It doesnt tell you how to change. So many people ask me, I cant just stop feeling depressed, anxious or even happy. So how can I stop eating in response to these emotions? The answer is that you need to understand how your emotions have become triggers associated with eating. Only then can you change your behavior. That is the stuff of learning.
Heres an exercise to put the concept of Learned Eating to work in helping you to identify and correct some of your unwanted eating behaviors and to learn some new healthier behaviors. In fact, this exercise is one of the very exercises that I do with emotional eaters who come to me for assistance if theyre struggling to make changes in their eating behavior either before or after weight loss surgery:
Take out a piece of paper and turn it horizontally. Across the top make eight columns going from top to bottom. Write the following headers on top of each column from left to right: Food eaten, Time of day, Location, Reason for Eating, Thoughts Before, Feelings Before, Thoughts After, and Feelings After. Make 14 copies of the page. Over the next two weeks (14 days), every time you eat, write down what you ate, when you ate it, where you ate it, why you ate it (as best you can tell) and what you were thinking and feeling both before AND after you ate. Many of you are sighing right now thinking I hate writing this stuff down! In my experience, most people hate writing down what they eat because they dont like what they see. However, its only by seeing what you are doing, understanding why you are doing it and being accountable to yourself that you can begin to change. Want to learn? Youve got to do your homework.
The purpose of this exercise is to learn as many of the associations between your eating and its causes as possible. In case youre wondering, you can think of the feelings column as the emotional eating column. Now there are certainly more than 6 causes for your eating behavior, but this will give you tons of useful clues as to the cues that trigger your eating. By filling out these forms you will start to see what is pushing your eating buttons. Sometimes it will be genuine hunger. When this is the case, be sure to write hungry in the why I ate it column. Sometimes youre going to eat potato chips because you were bored. Write bored in the why I ate it column. Sometimes it will be an emotion like loneliness that triggers your urge to eat. Write lonely in the feelings column. Always fill out every column because you are going to find some surprising associations by completing these logs. Youre going to find that where you are and the time of day are often the key triggers and not just that you were bored or lonely. You will find that feeling depressed isnt always the trigger for eating but feeling depressed when youre alone on a Friday night seems to push the potato chip eating button. Very important and useful information.
Learning to identify all of the cues, triggers and associations between your internal world (thoughts and feelings) and external world (people, places, times of day, etc) allows you to see what pushes your brains eating buttons. Having this information allows you to comprehensively assess your eating behavior and to identify where and how to make changes. For example: should you clearly see from your logs that being alone at home at night is almost 100% associated with eating ice cream, you now know that you must address whats going on at home under these circumstances. Perhaps you need to change what youre doing at home at night or consider finding ways of getting out of the house some evenings altogether! Heres another example that you probably already know: The very sight of certain foods is a big trigger for eating. This one is easy to fix and many of you already know this.stop bringing the foods you find irresistible into your home! Either unlearn the habit of bringing cake into your house or relearn by bringing in healthier foods to eat.
Hopefully, Ive convinced you that emotions are really just one of many triggers for eating and that Emotional Eating is no longer the best or most comprehensive concept to use if you want to make significant changes in your eating behavior. The concept of Learned Eating better explains how to understand, think about, and change your behavior. Take the time to learn as many of the cues, triggers and associations that relate to your eating behavior so that you can begin making changes in your eating and become more successful in keeping the weight off beginning right now. Do your homeworkits due tomorrow!!
Warren L. Huberman, Ph.D.
⢠Clinical Psychologist licensed in New York and New Jersey. ⢠Clinical Faculty in the Dept. of Psychiatry at the Langone/NYU School of Medicine. ⢠Affiliate Psychologist at the Langone/NYU Medical Center. ⢠Consulting Psychologist to the NYU Program for Surgical Weight Loss. ⢠Affiliate Psychologist in the Dept. of Psychiatry at Lenox Hill Hospital. ⢠Maintains a private practice in Clinical Psychology in Manhattan. Dr. Huberman can be reached at 212-983-6225.