Overcoming Emotional Eating Through Telehealth Therapy

Emotional Eating Therapy: Can Telehealth Make A Difference For Mental Health?

If you’ve noticed that you tend to turn to food as a source of comfort when experiencing negative emotions, you may be relying on emotional eating. Emotional eating is a coping mechanism that may occur due to a mental health condition. However, you don’t need to have a mental health diagnosis to develop emotional eating habits.

Life can be turbulent, and seeking comfort food occasionally when stressed may not be unusual. However, if you regularly want to eat when you’re not hungry, are concerned about your food cravings, binge eat, or don’t think you can stop emotionally eating, it may be advantageous to seek the support of a mental health professional through telehealth services like ReachLink.

Understanding emotional eating and its connection to stress and negative emotions

Emotional eating is the practice of eating not when you’re necessarily hungry but as a response to challenging emotions. These emotions may be negative feelings like anger or sadness. However, emotional eating can also be a response to positive feelings like happiness or excitement. This compulsive behavior is often referred to as stress eating, as stress is one of its most frequent triggers.

Potential emotional eating triggers

Various life situations may result in an emotional eating episode, including but not limited to the following:

• General stress
• Romantic relationship challenges, like a breakup
• High-pressure situations at work or school
• Financial worries
• Health conditions or symptoms, like chronic illness or fatigue
• Relationship conflict with friends or family
• Concerns related to parenting
• Major life stressors and transitions like getting married, changing jobs, relocating, or losing someone close to you
• Daily challenges or routines

Risk factors for emotional eating

At its core, emotional eating is often a coping mechanism to suppress intense feelings and avoid processing them. Some people may be more at risk for developing emotional eating patterns. Behavioral, psychological, and genetic risk factors may come into play, including:

• A history of trauma
• A need to perceive being in control
• A mental health condition like depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• Regularly engaging in unhealthy coping mechanisms like substance use
• Low self-esteem
• Difficulty recognizing, controlling, and expressing emotions
• Being related to someone who has also experienced emotional eating
• Being on a diet that requires you to restrict food intake or type
• A history of dieting or otherwise denying yourself food (or other pleasures)
• Exposure to unhealthy eating patterns
• Growing up around family members with disordered eating patterns
• Internalized harmful societal messages related to weight loss, body image, and food consumption

Breaking the cycle of emotional eating and negative emotions

Emotional eating can develop into a cycle where a person eats to suppress negative emotions and then feels stronger negative emotions, such as guilt, as a result. As an individual processes how much they eat, they may want to eat more to suppress their feelings again. Virtual therapy sessions through ReachLink can address this cycle and help rewire emotional eating habits.

Relationships between emotional eating and eating disorders

Engaging in emotional eating is not the same as having an eating disorder, though the two can be related. Emotional eating and similar behavior can be symptoms of an eating disorder like binge eating disorder, but it can also occur in people with no other symptoms of mental illness. If a person uses emotional eating as a coping mechanism, that habit may increase the risk of developing an eating disorder.

If you are experiencing a crisis related to an eating disorder or would like further resources, contact the ANAD Eating Disorders Helpline at 1-888-375-7767 from Monday through Friday, 9 am to 9 pm CT.

Emotional regulation techniques you may learn in telehealth therapy for emotional eating

Connecting with a licensed therapist through ReachLink’s secure video platform to discuss your emotional eating patterns may initially cause fear. However, a therapist skilled in addressing these concerns can work with you to develop practices to combat the urge to eat emotionally.

Telehealth therapy for emotional eating can help you make progress on understanding what incites you to eat so you can redirect your desire for comfort food. Various therapeutic techniques, including the following, may assist you in this process.

Keeping a food diary

In emotional eating therapy, the first step you and your ReachLink therapist take might be to make a plan to keep a food diary. A food diary records when you eat, what you eat, and how much you eat.

Your food diary can involve more than diet tracking in emotional eating therapy. Your therapist may encourage you to write about your emotional state before and after eating. Before eating, you might write about your feelings and thoughts. After you eat, you can write down whether your emotions felt more manageable or if you stopped eating because you felt full.

Keeping tabs on your feelings about your eating behaviors can help you and your therapist recognize how specific emotional experiences may translate into increased food consumption. You may also better recognize the difference between eating from hunger and eating incited by an emotional event.

Over time, as your emotional eating is under control, you may find yourself documenting instances where you experienced an inciting event in your food diary but did not engage in unwanted behavior.

Your therapist might not recommend a food diary if you have other eating disorders, such as anorexia or bulimia, as tracking the time you eat, your weight, and the type of food you eat in an attempt to achieve weight loss can be unhealthy when done as a symptom of an eating disorder. Weight management can be healthy when done correctly and when you find a doctor specializing in this area instead of controlling the process on your own.

Talking to a mindfulness-based mental health professional

Mindfulness is the practice of grounding yourself in the present moment and increasing awareness of what is happening with your body. It can be crucial to better understanding and combatting emotional eating patterns. If you want to stop emotional eating and using comfort foods to cope, you may benefit from talking to a mindfulness-based mental health professional through ReachLink’s telehealth platform.

Your therapist may encourage you to develop a habit of mindful eating, which may involve taking smaller bites of your food, chewing your food more slowly, not choosing food for comfort, and focusing on your body’s physical reaction to food consumption. This shifted mindset may help you better recognize when your body needs food for sustenance instead of seeking food for emotional comfort.

Working on negative feelings through emotional regulation and virtual therapy

Since emotional eating is often a response to strong emotions, telehealth therapy may work on developing more healthy ways to address emotional turbulence. One potential method of cultivating emotional resilience is