Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Minimikipedia on a Monday. And I want to chat about emotional eating and what actually helps. And I know that I've done several podcasts in the realm of this, and I just think it is such a good reminder for people who struggle in this area. And in fact, a practitioner had asked me recently how she should help a client who describes herself as an emotional eater, that it's a lifelong pattern.

She eats when she eats when she's stressed, she eats when the day has been long and she finally sits down. And she's tried everything she's read about and nothing has stuck. And it's a good question, right? And I want to ask it, and I want to think about the topic, not just from like the, that aren't food when it comes to emotional eating, but also I think it's worth asking whether it is even emotional eating to begin with.

And so let's just start there. Emotional eating has a pretty straightforward definition. You eat more in response to a particular emotion. It's not always negative. Some people eat when they're really happy or more than just celebratory eating, but when they feel pleasure or joy, they will eat.

And emotional eating is measured with questionnaires, which is how we have some literature on it. And the most commonly used ones are the Dutch eating behavior questionnaire and the emotional eating scale.

And millions of people have filled these in, and it's determined the type of emotional eater that they might be.

The thing is though, is that when researchers take people who score high on these questionnaires and put them in a lab, they induce a genuinely negative mood, because that's often what the scales are measuring, eating in response to a negative mood.

And then they measure how much the person actually eats. The self-identified emotional eaters largely don't eat more than anyone else.

And this has been tested repeatedly, including in studies designed specifically to answer the criticism that earlier attempts used weak mood inductions and boring food, i.e. didn't really induce a negative mood.

And who would eat the food that they put because it was bland and just not that tasty.

However, the result holds. Bongers and Janssen were two such researchers who reviewed the whole literature, and they concluded that emotional eating scales do lack the predictive and discriminative validity.

They just don't measure what they claim to measure.

And there is another study I just want to mention, which is a meta-analysis that pulled 56 experimental studies on nearly 3,700 participants, and they all were testing whether emotions causally affect eating.

And negative emotion increased eating in restrained eaters.

So it did not increase eating in people who described themselves as emotional eaters.

It did not increase eating in people with overweight or obesity.

And it did not increase people eating in people with eating disorders in that pulled analysis of all of the literature.

So the group who reliably ate more under a negative emotion state were people who dieted.

They weren't the self-identified emotional eaters.

And then look, this doesn't mean emotional eating isn't real.

In people with clinical binge eating, it shows up consistently.

And when researchers stop using questionnaires and instead ping people on their phones several times a day,

boredom, stress, and low mood do reliably precede food craving in ordinary life.

And look, if you're a usual person who identifies as having some emotional eating behavior, that is not going to be news to you.

I just think that the label that people have been handed is a bit of a poor description of it.

So, when someone says to you that they're an emotional eater, they are telling you something real about the experience,

but they might be wrong about the mechanism.

And here's a place to sort of start.

So a large proportion of what gets labeled emotional eating is actually just under-fueling with an emotional trigger sitting on top of it.

So restraint, meaning the attempt to restrict food, is one of the more robust predictors of a loss of control eating in the literature.

There is a nice piece of work in adults with binge spectrum eating disorders where researchers surveyed people repeatedly through the day for a fortnight

and found that attempted restraint predicted the next loss of control episode better than actual restriction did.

So it was the trying to avoid the enjoyable foods and trying to limit the amount more than the actual achieved calorie reduction

that predicted what happened next.

So the first questions should be mechanical.

So if someone says that they're emotional eating, a really good audit to run is, are they eating enough earlier in the day?

Is protein present at each meal?

Are they eating in a way that helps satisfy their hunger and not leading to cravings later on that move beyond protein?

Things like volume of food, things like speed of eating, the texture of the food, the flavors that they're eating,

like all of these things signify satiety, are these being met?

And is the individual going long stretches without eating?

Is she sleeping?

And I probably don't need to tell you at this point that sleep restriction reliably increases cravings.

So it raises ghrelin, which is our hunger hormone.

It lowers leptin, which is our satiety hormone.

And it increases hunger and appetite.

With the biggest jump in appetite for calorie-dense foods, the brain imaging work adds to that mechanism.

So after sleep deprivation, activity drops in the frontal and insular regions that evaluate food,

while the amygdala activity goes up.

So this results on people wanting higher calorie food,

and how much they want tracks reliably with how badly people sleep, or they feel they slept.

And there was a study, actually, where they used habitual seven to nine-hour sleepers,

and they cut the time in bed by a third, just for a single night.

And after that one night, there was more hunger, more cravings,

and more chocolate eating on a food reward task,

and larger self-selection portions at lunch.

And that was just a night.

Someone running on six hours of sleep and coffee until two in the afternoon

will present exactly like an emotional eater.

Every symptom will match, but the intervention needs to be completely different.

So first up, when it comes to emotional eating, rule out that mechanical stuff first.

If the pattern persists while an individual is genuinely well-fed and well-sweeped,

then it's effect-driven, meaning actually there is something going on beyond that stuff

that needs to be addressed.

Now, there are a couple of different patterns with emotional eating that I think are worth mentioning.

And the first one is locked to the clock.

So you are fine all day, and then it just goes sideways somewhere between five and ten at night,

regardless of what kind of day it was.

Whereas the second pattern is something is tied to a situation instead.

A difficult call, a conflict, a piece of news,

and it happens at 11 in the morning on a Tuesday just as readily as it would nine at night.

So the time-locked version is usually arithmetic, right?

So if breakfast was a coffee and lunch was plain chicken salad or whatever was left in the fridge,

there's a deficit by mid-afternoon, and it has to go somewhere.

It goes somewhere in the evening.

And so cue exposure compounds it.

So the kitchen is right there.

Work has stopped.

We're able to just relax a little bit,

so we're no longer driven by our sympathetic nervous system.

And the structure that holds that day together has just come off completely.

The other thing worth noting is that it's even worse in restrained eaters

when a lot of the self-control resources have been depleted across the course of a day.

So if they've had to really commit and be quite what they would term discipline

and use their willpower across a day,

and not necessarily just in food,

but in other areas when they wanted to say something but had to hold their tongue

or, you know, whatever that is,

then it's going to be worse at night than it otherwise would be.

Now, the situation-locked version doesn't follow the clock at all.

And it's not true that emotional eating only occurs at night.

There were a few phone-based studies that looked particularly across a day,

and it was only 764 people,

but they answered multiple surveys a day for one to three weeks,

and feeling bored, irritated, stressed is associated with more craving at that moment

and with craving at the next check-in.

So it's just when that emotion occurs,

people are far more likely to gravitate towards or want to eat foods they otherwise wouldn't.

So if it's the same window of time most nights that you are experiencing this emotional eating,

you want to look at the front half of the day and at sleep before you look at anything else.

Is there anything that you can do around problem-solving in those areas

to help mitigate what you're experiencing at night?

If your emotional eating shows up across any time of the day

and tracks with what happened rather than being clock-driven,

then that is definitely a problem that is less about the mechanical stuff

and much more about the emotional piece.

One of the first recommendations to help combat emotional eating

is having a regular eating structure.

Eat at planned intervals roughly every four or so hours,

regardless of how the day is going emotionally.

The body loves structure.

It loves routine.

And the physiological amplifier gets removed.

So if you're pretty chaotic with your food,

then this will help bring your appetite signal more in alignment with when you should be eating.

And when eating is no longer contingent on mood or on how the day is gone,

the emotional signal can become visible.

So regardless of, I guess, whether it is situational

or whether it's sort of tied to the clock,

one of the first things I recommend people do

is just get into the habit of having a regular eating structure.

Chaotic eating will drive hunger,

and that will only impact more on the emotional state that you're experiencing

that can trigger emotional eating and stress eating.

So we want to remove the hunger signal that might amplify your emotive state.

So eating consistently is actually really great for the body as well.

Like the body likes routine,

and hunger is better regulated when you're more routine and structured around the food that you eat.

If you're chaotic with your food,

then your body doesn't know when that next meal is coming in.

So you can feel more hunger because everyone is in the dark about when you're next going to eat.

So have structured meals around those pillars of nutrition

that I've just briefly mentioned before,

but you hear me talk about all the time.

That will help with your energy, help balance blood sugar.

It will help your body's anticipatory response to food,

and that is going to help delineate what is an emotion that you're responding to,

and what is hunger.

So that is one of the first things to consider.

The second thing to do is track the trigger.

So for two weeks, log what happens immediately before you eat.

What situation was it?

What was the emotion?

What intensity?

So this isn't about tracking the food.

It's about tracking the feelings around the food.

And so most people discover that their triggers are far narrower than what they thought.

It's usually two or three specific situations.

The gap between arriving home and starting dinner.

The hour after a meeting that went badly.

Sunday afternoon.

The point isn't which ones they are.

It's that the list is short, and it's your list of predictable triggers.

And over a couple of weeks, two to three weeks, you can absolutely sort of dial that in.

And this actually has been tested head to head against planning.

So there is something to an if-then plan as well.

So what I mean by if-then is if situation X occurs, then I will do Y.

And it's much better to try and add behaviours to your list rather than avoid doing a certain behaviour.

For example, you don't want your plan to be just simply, if I come home from work wound up,

I'm going to avoid going into the kitchen and raiding the pantry.

Like, that sort of negative, that taking away or saying that you're not going to do something has actually found to be not that helpful if you look at the literature.

So it's much better to have a planned behaviour that you're going to do in place.

Like, if I come home from work wound up, I'm going to go for a walk around the block.

Like, you've got something that you're layering in rather than trying to avoid doing something.

And possibly in life, that's actually just a good rule to have anyway.

And it's much better for you to have just one plan for one situation rather than having multiple plans.

Because multiple plans can muddy the waters a bit and may not be as effective when you're suddenly faced with four things that you could be doing.

It's much better just to take that decision fatigue away.

Because when you are stressed or you are highly strung or, you know, whatever, you're not, that decision fatigue could probably lead to you doing, like, not much or nothing.

So something else worth noting is, you know, name it.

So putting a feeling into words does reduce the amygdala activation in the brain and increases activity in the prefrontal regions that help regulate it.

It's called effect labelling.

So what this means is, is that practically before eating, name it out loud or in writing, I'm frustrated, I'm relieved, I'm bored, and I don't want to be alone with that.

So it does two things, right?

It buys a gap between the feeling and the behavior, which is often all that's needed.

And it helps clarify what you actually want, which is frequently not food.

And people know this as well.

Like, they're like, oh, bugger it, and all I can think about is chocolate when they're highly stressed.

And then they start half a block deep, and they're like, I didn't really want this chocolate.

So it does give you that pause.

And that can help begin to change that behavior.

Another thing worth mentioning is that these urges and these cravings, they're self-limiting.

So it's not a state that persists until you give in to it.

It rises, it peaks, and it falls, generally within about 10 or 20 minutes, whether or not you act on it.

And a lot of people don't know about this because they've never gone beyond that peak.

They've resolved every urge they've ever had by eating.

So their entire evidence base says urges end when you eat.

However, if you can wait, even if it is with a timer and you're white-knuckling it, that can not only occupy your attention, but then you can reassess.

Like, even make a deal with yourself that, you know, if in 10 minutes I still want the food, then I'm going to have it.

Great.

Just wait out that 10 minutes.

So the goal here isn't to never eat in response to an emotion, because I think that that may be pretty impossible if this is a lifetime of behavior.

The goal is to make it a choice rather than an automatic sequence.

So you have a lot more control and you have that feeling of control when you do eat.

Or on the occasion that you decide not to eat, you start to build that evidence that actually that urge will pass if I just wait it out.

And one other thing worth noting is that self-criticism after an episode of emotional eating will reliably predict more eating.

And this has been tested in the literature.

Women who scored high on restrictive eating were given an unhealthy food preload, the classic diet-breaking setup, you know.

And then half of them received a brief self-compassion prompt and the prompt reduced distress and reduced how much they subsequently ate compared with no prompt at all.

And this has actually been studied in clinical patients as well, like people with eating disorders such as bulimia or binge eating disorder.

And it's reliably been found that groups that had an opportunity to express self-compassion ate significantly less, rated the food as less pleasurable, and reported less desire to keep eating.

So always remember that the spiral after an emotional eating episode, that's the problem.

The biscuit, the half a pack of biscuits, the block of chocolate, in of itself, is far less detrimental than what happens next.

It's always about what happens next.

Now, one thing I do want to acknowledge is that if you think you are an emotional eater, or you know you're an emotional eater, most of us would know whether we are or not.

But you frequently eat past physical discomfort, you eat secretly, or there's significant distress afterwards, then I do think that's worth screening properly and referring to a psychologist with eating disorder experience.

Even like one or two sessions with someone to figure out whether this is you or not might be really helpful and might sort of open up something that you can work through with an appropriate practitioner.

Like, because behaviors like that aren't, I mean, all of this isn't about the food itself, but, you know, there's a lot that can underlie these behaviors that are worth working on if you want to get on top of it.

So, in a nutshell then, rule out under-eating, chaotic eating, under-sleeping, because a large share of what looks like emotional eating may just be physiology.

And have a think about when it happens most for you, whether it is just locked into the clock, or whether it's more about the situation.

Put that regular eating structure in place to remove the amplifier that hunger would provide.

Track the trigger rather than the food, and do this for two weeks to figure out the particular triggers, because they will be more narrow than what you imagined them to be.

Then build one if-then plan, so you've got something to do when you are triggered in that situation.

Just one. You don't want a 15 multi-stage plan going on.

Also want to delay 10 minutes before eating anything.

Just white-knuckle that 10 minutes out and wait for that urge to pass, because that urge is self-limiting, and it will pass.

And then, when you do have a lapse, and it does occur, just know that the most important thing is what happens next, isn't that that lapse occurred.

So, this is a work-on.

And for some people, this is something where they may need more professional support, just to be able to work through it.

But I hope that what you can glean from this is, this isn't a willpower issue, the way that it is often set up in our minds.

Like, oh, I just have no willpower. It's nothing like that.

This is much more about these learned behaviours, and figuring out a way to sort of crack that nut, if you like.

So guys, that's just a bit of info on emotional eating, and I've got some resources if you want to look a little bit more at some literature around it.

Hit me up. I've got it right here.

I'm over on Instagram, Threads and X, at Mickey Willardin, Facebook, at Mickey Willardin Nutrition, or head to my website, mickeywillardin.com, and book a one-on-one call with me.

All right, guys. Have the best week. See you later.