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Emotional Eating during the Holidays

Michelle May

Holiday-emotional-eating

Along with all the events centered around food during the holidays, emotions are on overdrive. Here’s why emotional eating during the holidays is so common and ways to handle “head hunger.”

Emotional eating is normal in the holidays and year-round

Emotional connections to food are woven into the fabric of our social experience. Notice how often food is at the center of your holiday celebrations: office parties, baking Christmas cookies with grandma, and sharing traditional meals with your family and friends. Eating is a wonderful way to reminisce, nurture, and bond.

Emotional eating is normal, even healthy – unless it is the primary way you cope with or avoid your feelings.

During the holidays, emotional eating becomes magnified. Not only is food everywhere, but you may feel more stressed, lonely, exhausted, overwhelmed, or even happier – all common triggers for emotional eating.

How emotional eating leads to overeating during the holidays

Emotional eating often leads to overeating. Here are seven reasons emotional eating during the holidays can be such a challenge:

  1. Food is a quick, convenient, easy way to manage your feelings. When feelings come up—and they will—it is easy to reach for food to stuff them down or calm yourself.
  2. Emotional eating during the holidays is common.When you’re eating for emotional reasons, you’re more likely to reach for sweets, salty snacks, and comfort foods. In other words, why you are eating affects what you eat.
  3. Emotional eating is often mindless, so you barely notice what you are putting in your mouth or how full you’re getting—until it’s too late.
  4. You can eat a lot of food when you’re eating for emotional reasons. If hunger doesn’t tell you to start eating, what tells you to stop?
  5. Emotional eating might give you temporary pleasure or distraction, but you may want to eat again when the effects fade.
  6. Food alone can’t really make you happy or less stressed, so your emotional triggers come back again and again.
  7. Emotional eating can lead to shame and guilt, ironically two of the most powerful emotional triggers for more overeating.

Handling Holiday Head Hunger

The way to break out of this pattern is to create a self-care buffer zone to decrease emotional triggers. When it happens anyway (and it will), learn to identify and handle head hunger more effectively using FEAST. When you do, you’ll feel better, for longer.

How to reduce triggers for emotional eating

Practice Self-Care: Give yourself the gift of adequate sleep, balanced meals, regular physical activity, and unscheduled time to decompress. (Read more in chapter 8 of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat.)

Holiday-emotional-self-careDo What You Love: What are your favorite holiday activities? Who do you want to spend time with? Which events are the most meaningful to you? Which ones could you do without this year?

Eat What You Love: Deprivation and guilt are powerful emotional triggers that can lead to overeating, so choose foods that nourish your body and your soul.

Love What You Eat: Eating can be a satisfying emotional experience. Savor each bite mindfully, staying conscious of how your body feels as you eat.

Recognize Head Hunger: Whenever you feel like eating, first ask yourself, “Am I hungry?” Look for physical signs that you need fuel.

If you’re not hungry, FEAST instead!

When you want to eat, pause to notice whether you are physically hungry. If you’re not, you can still choose to eat if you want to. However, this is a great opportunity to identify and meet your real needs. (Then eat when you get hungry later!)

We use a technique called FEAST: Focus, Explore, Accept, Strategize, Take Action. (From chapter 3 of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat: A Mindful Eating Program to Break Your Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle.)

Focus

Pause… What is going on inside of you? Focus on your physical state, your thoughts, and your feelings. Identify any possible triggers for eating such as fatigue, boredom, overwhelm, or nostalgia.

Explore

Complete this statement: I feel _______ because _______. Peel away the layers by asking “why?” and “what else?” Sometimes “I want a cookie” means “I want comfort,” or “I want rest,” “I want to escape from this conversation,” or “I want to experience the joy I remember from my childhood.”

Accept (Allow)

Criticizing yourself for your thoughts, feelings, and actions will keep you stuck in old patterns. Accept that your emotions, no matter how difficult or trivial they may seem, tell you something about your needs. Allow your feelings rather than trying to shove them down.

Strategize

What could you do to meet your underlying need? (If you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got!) Brainstorm as many choices as you can think of.

Take Action

The step you take will depend on your specific need; just make sure it small, realistic, and takes you in the general direction of meeting your true needs.

When you FEAST instead of eat, you turn your emotional triggers into opportunities for self-care during the holidays!

This article has been updated from a previously published version.

Enjoyed this article? Here are three more to help you:

Handling Holiday Eating and Stress: A Recipe for Mindful Eating

Three Ways to Handle Triggers for Holiday Overeating

Rewrite Those Ridiculous Holiday Eating Tips

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