Online Therapy for Emotional Eating and Food Addiction
Today it’s estimated that over 28 million people in the United States alone deal with an eating disorder at some point in their lives. Not only that, but it’s also estimated that eating disorders affect over 9% of the entire population worldwide. It’s astounding that one of our most basic needs as humans is so closely entwined with such disorders.
Eating Disorders don’t discriminate. People of every race; age group, sexual orientation and social background suffer from eating disorders. While both sexes can suffer with eating disorders, according to recent studies emotional eating and food addiction is thought to be more common with women than it is men.
What is Emotional Eating?
Emotional eating is the use of food as an attempt to quell or shut off negative feelings and emotions, while food addiction is a seeming inability to stop eating certain foods. Both of these disorders are very closely linked, not only in the way that they affect people but also the way that they can be treated.
With emotional eating, people will typically eat to try to shut off negative feelings such as stress, anger, guilt or sadness. Not only does this not actually shut off the feelings any more than temporarily, but in the long run it only makes people feel worse.
After having eaten the food not only does the initial emotion that caused them the problem remain, but the person will tend to feel guilty for having given in to their food addiction. The added problem is that emotional eating over time can lead to weight gain, is yet another reason why emotional eating only makes people feel worse in the long run.
Food addiction is very similar to emotional eating. It’s also used to try to shut off or ignore negative feelings, thoughts or emotions. In addition food addiction is addictive behavior that just makes people feel worse in the long run, due to giving into their disorder — as well as the added weight gain and health problems over time.
Both disorders are used in an attempt to avoid negative thoughts, feelings and emotions — and both typically lead to weight gain over time. It is for these reasons that emotional eating and food addiction are so closely related.
What are the Symptoms of Overeating due to Emotions?
People who are emotional eaters will typically go to food many times per week to try to shut off or stop their negative feelings. Normally they will then feel shame and guilt after doing so, leading to a never-ending cycle of overeating guilt, shame and weight gain.
The Warning Signs of Emotional Eating and Food Addiction:
Emotional eater’s usually crave specific comfort foods based on the individual. Emotional eaters and people with food addiction will tend to crave junk foods, or foods high in salt, saturated fat and sugar. These types of foods often trigger dopamine in the brain, giving the person a temporary feeling of gratification. Many emotional eaters instinctively reach for junk foods, such as chocolate, ice cream, potato chips, pizza and french fries.
Emotional hunger isn’t felt the same way as physical hunger. Rather than the typical feeling of an empty stomach, emotional eaters will experience their hunger as a mental craving — or a thought that they simply can’t stop thinking about. They also tend to focus on the taste and smell of certain foods, typically their individual comfort foods.
Emotional hunger triggers in an instant. In both emotional hunger and food addiction, the urge to eat is both strong and immediate. On the other hand, genuine physical hunger takes time to develop. When you’re legitimately hungry the desire for food will come on slower and with less urgency.
Emotional hunger doesn’t stop after you’ve eaten. While physical hunger can be satisfied, emotional hunger doesn’t go away or comes right back after a little time has passed. Emotional hunger is like a switch that doesn’t shut off. Because you haven’t corrected the underlying emotion, emotional hunger will continue to cause you to keep craving more and more of your usual comfort foods
Emotional hunger can cause a negative self image. When you feel genuine hunger and you eat afterwards, you’re likely to feel satisfied as your body is now content. Unlike genuine feelings of hunger, after emotional hunger or food addiction cause you to binge it normally leads to feelings of guilt or shame — and the cycle of emotional eating continues.
Emotional eating and food addiction go hand-in-hand with thoughtless snacking. Most people dealing with either emotional eating, food addiction or both tend to also engage in thoughtless snacking. This means that the person will often consume a large amount of junk food before they even realize it. Typically this would be a person watching TV — who all of a sudden realizes that they ate the entire box of cookies, potato chips or other such snack food.
What Causes Emotional Eating / Food Addiction?
Anything can cause emotional eating or addictive overeating. Stress from things like relationships, past abuse, home life, work issues, health, among other things could all be the cause for any emotional overeating that you may be engaging in. (Source)
When you’re stressed your body will produce higher amounts of cortisol, which is also known as the stress hormone. A side effect of cortisol is that it can trigger strong cravings for foods that are sweet, deep fried, fatty or salty. Simply put, junk food. These types of food often give a fast and strong jolt of pleasure to the brain, similar to caffeine.
People who have dealt with long term stressful conditions in their life such as family problems, health problems or prolonged stress are at significantly higher risk for developing emotional eating disorders. Long term stressful conditions create higher continuous levels of cortisol in the brain. These high levels of cortisol over time greatly increase the chances of becoming an emotional eater or developing a food addiction either immediately or later on in life
What Makes Your Symptoms Worse?
When people use food to cope with stressful or negative emotions it can often become their go to way of dealing with their feelings. Then, whenever they feel stressed out or upset it becomes instinctive for them to reach for the potato chips, cookies or other junk food. When this happens, it creates the continuous cycle of emotional eating / food addiction.
To make things worse, the cycle of food addiction and emotional eating normally leads to weight gain — which then only makes the person feel more negative emotions about their situation. This is the unhealthy cycle of eating disorders.
Food Addiction and Compulsive Overeating
Whether dealing with food addiction or emotional eating, a person’s emotions tend to become so linked with their eating patterns that they will instantly reach for those junk foods whenever they’re worried, stressed or upset. They will do this unconsciously, without even thinking about what they’re doing.
Emotional eaters also use food as a distraction when they become stressed out, angry or upset about something that they will have to deal with in the future. They will tend to use salty or sweet junk foods to distract them, rather than dealing with the actual problem.
But keep in mind, it doesn’t matter how helpless you may feel when it comes to emotional eating or food addiction. You can make a change. Once you learn smarter and better ways of dealing with your negative emotions worry and life’s stresses, you will finally be free of any emotional eating patterns that held you back in the past.
How to Stop Emotional Eating
One of the most important steps to overcome your emotional eating and or food addiction is to recognize the difference between your emotional / addiction based hunger vs. real physical hunger.
Emotional / Addictive Hunger:
Is usually triggered but a strong negative emotion.
Triggers in an instant and feels like it has to be dealt with immediately.
Causes cravings for certain specific types of foods like sweets, salty snacks or other types of junk food.
Real Physical Hunger:
Comes on slowly and with less urgency.
Can be satiated by healthy foods like lean protein vegetables nuts and dairy.
Take Note of Your Emotional Triggers
One of the first things that you need to do in order to eliminate your emotional eating patterns is to recognize and understand your own personal triggers. What are the people, places or things that trigger you to reach for the junk food in order to feel better? Recognizing and acknowledging your own personal triggers helps to stop the pattern of emotional eating from continuing unconsciously.
Get a notebook and start to write them down every time you experience them. Continue doing this for a few weeks, taking note of every single time you are triggered, or feel the urge to reach for comfort food to feel better. Write down all of the people, places, things and feelings that caused you to want to engage in emotional eating. After a few weeks you’ll have a pretty clear idea of you’re most common and powerful triggers.
Keep a Food Journal
While you’re at it, you should use that same notebook mentioned above to keep track of everything that you’re eating. Also write down what you are thinking and feeling every time you eat something, whether it’s emotional eating or not. Make note of any activities you are engaged in that could cause you stress or negative feelings and make you want to eat something.
You should write down the good as well as the bad for example:
I ate a piece of chicken and some cooked veggies for dinner. I was thinking about the TV show that I was watching while preparing and eating dinner.
Or
I ate some chocolate. I was feeling stressed about my upcoming exam.
Continue writing in your food journal for at least 2 to 4 weeks. After a while you should start to see certain patterns that tend to trigger your emotions. You’ll get a clearer picture of the feelings and emotions that are active around your overeating and / or food addiction.
Overcoming emotional eating and food addiction is not easy to do on your own. If you’ve tried various self help methods yet none of them seem to work, you should seriously consider trying therapy with a professional who’s well-versed in emotional eating and eating disorders in general.
Possibly the most effective treatment with the highest success rate for overcoming your emotional eating or food addiction is counseling with a professional, licensed therapist.
Online Therapy for Overeating Maybe More Effective than In Person Counseling
As online therapy has been gaining more and more popularity over the past few years, there are now many great platforms available that make online counseling available to everyone. Not only is online therapy far more cost-effective and convenient — studies are now starting to show that it may be even more effective than in-person counseling. (Source)
Online therapy is less expensive than in-person treatment. People who couldn’t otherwise afford counseling with a licensed therapist can now do so as online therapy is much more affordable for most people.
Online therapy is more convenient. Now you can receive treatment right from the comfort of your own home, anytime of the day or night. Your treatment program can be on your schedule. People who otherwise couldn’t receive treatment due to their schedule (people who work nights and weekends, etc) are now able to receive treatment when it’s convenient for them. As an added bonus you don’t have to get cleaned up, drive to your appointment — or even leave the house.
Online counseling is more private. You have the choice on whether or not you would like to receive video counseling, online chat or text and email counseling. You can decide whether or not your therapist ever even sees your face. You decide how much or how little personal information you’d like to share with your own individual therapist.
Most online therapy platforms work only with licensed, professional therapists. Furthermore, most of these platforms also require their therapists to have several years of experience and private practice in the field, as well as meet other guidelines before they are allowed to take on any clients. You can be assured that you’re only going to be matched up with professional therapists who have been well screened and vetted.
Online Therapy — Where Should You Start?
There are a few different online therapy platforms these days, and you don’t want to pick the wrong one when you’re looking to get started with your own therapy program. Below we’ll go over the platforms which we find are the most respective, professional and well known.
For anyone who’s serious about trying online therapy, Calmerry is one of the best platforms the industry today. They feature on demand video counseling with your therapist, as well as unlimited messaging — 24 hours a day.
Calmerry has a robust and easy to use interface that matches you up with a therapist that’s right for you. If at any time you don’t like your therapist you can quickly and anonymously request a new one for free.
They have many highly respected, licensed therapists who specialize in emotional eating and food addiction, as well as many other eating disorders.
In fact, 88% of their clients found Calmerry to be as effective or more effective than traditional therapy- while 95% of them found it to be way more convenient than face to face therapy.
They’ve generously offered to give all of my readers 30% off of your first month if you sign up through this link.
One of my personal favorite platforms, Online Therapy has a great system for online counseling. You can instant message, video conference and live chat with your personal therapist and it’s easy to use.
You get unlimited messaging and a live one on one session weekly with any membership level, and of course all of their therapists are real licensed professionals in their area. They agreed to give my readers 20% off of your first month if you sign up through this link.
One of the most well known in the industry, Talkspace is a leader in online therapy and counseling. Talkspace boasts and easy to use user interface, a mobile app for any immediate help you need and all of their therapists are both licensed and background checked. They have therapists who specialize in many different conditions like depression, OCD, anxiety disorders, BPD as well as eating disorders.
You can typically get a couple of chat responses a day, and video chat is available if you need more help. They also have unlimited messaging on any of their plans.
With so many choices for professional online therapy platforms, it might benefit some people to try out more than one and see what works best for them. So whether you choose Calmerry, Online Therapy, Talkspace, or some other online counseling platform, remember that it takes time for any therapy program to be effective.
Don’t continue the cycle of emotional eating any longer, you can start your recovery from the comfort of your own home today. Be open with your therapist and stick with it and you too can soon be free from any eating disorder.
