Earlier this month, John Briffa wrote an interesting post on his blog: Is ‘emotional eating’ always due to emotions?
In my experience, many individuals who believe they have an ‘emotional eating’ problem appear to have nothing of the sort. How do I know this? Because, I’ve seen time and again that when an ‘emotional’ eater eats properly, and in particular stabilise their blood sugar level, their ‘emotional ‘eating’ just disappears. In many individuals, what appears to be a psychological issue is, in reality, physiological in nature.
Well, I’d argue, as I did in Dr. Briffa’s comments, that all “emotional” eating is essentially physiological!
Now wait, hear me out. Are emotions involved in overeating? Absolutely. But my argument is that you can’t really separate stressful emotions from the physiological — and that has implications for how to deal with it.
Interestingly, Chris Kresser touches on this on his recent podcast about the gut-brain axis, where he mentions that in Chinese medicine, they take a systems approach that doesn’t differentiate between emotion, psychology & physiology:
The truth is you cannot talk about emotion without talking about physiology and you can’t talk about physiology without talking about emotion. They’re not connected; they’re just the same system.
Appetite vs hunger
One thing that I think is important when considering overeating is to differentiate between appetite and hunger. Wikipedia says that appetite is the “desire to eat food, felt as hunger.”
Well, I beg to differ. Or at least, I think it’s worth looking at this slightly differently. I agree that appetite is a desire to eat food (sometimes great quantities of food), but this is not necessarily connected to the physical sensations of hunger in the gut.
This is overly simplistic, but I like to think that appetite is the brain telling you to eat, hunger is the stomach. And this would be fine if the brain only drove you to eat when you actually needed food. Aye, there’s the rub!
Hopefully you know what real stomach hunger feels like. Maybe your stomach will feel empty or it might even growl at you. But if you’re anything like me, you can often feel the desire/urge/craving to eat well before this happens. I don’t think it is a coincidence that, between industrial food and our stressful environments, we’re eating a lot more food, a lot more frequently than our bodies need. I think this is appetite run amok.
As Dr. Briffa suggests, one of the ways your brain can urge you to eat is when your blood sugar gets low. But that’s not the only way your brain can be involved in urges to eat.
If you haven’t, I strongly urge you to watch Gabor Mate’s video Brain Development & Addiction. He lays out four pathways to addiction — and whether or not you buy the idea of “food addiction” — it’s easy to see how there are different mechanisms that can be at play as far as the brain and appetite (including one I find very compelling, the endocannabinoid system … see the section re inflammation and the munchies).
Key takeaway: it’s not “emotional” eating if the foods you eat are messing with your brain!
Pavlov’s dog & your lizard brain
Perhaps you’ve gotten this far, but you’re still convinced you overeat for emotional reasons. Well, yes, you’re may well be responding to an emotional trigger (your spouse yelled at you, you got cut off in traffic, or the scale went up instead of down).
But again, I would suggest that you don’t have psychology without physiology … and like Pavlov’s famous experiment, what may be at work here is classical conditioning: over time, perhaps you’ve conditioned yourself to use food to manage stress — because it works!
So the bad news for emotional overeaters is that it’s likely that part of your brain has learned that the way to deal with some troubling emotion is with food, and as Seth Godin says in Linchpin, it always wins in a fight (emphasis mine):
The first part of our brain, the part that shows up first in the womb, the part that was there a million years ago — that’s our lizard brain. The lizard brain is in charge of fight or flight, of anger, and of survival. That’s all we used to need, and even now, when there’s an emergency, the lizard brain is still in charge. …
The lizard brain is here to keep you alive; the rest of your brain merely makes you a happy, successful, connected member of society.
So the two parts duke it out. And when put on the alert, the lizard brain wins, every time, unless you establish new habits and better patterns — patterns that keep the lizard at bay.
The good news, I think, is that just as we can learn a behavior, we can ‘unlearn’ it. Or as Godin says, “create an environment where the lizard snoozes.”
Me, I’ve been spending the last several months trying to do just that.
Diet
In this respect, I think Dr. Briffa is spot on. If you are an overeater, it’s essential to eat a diet that 1) stabilizes blood sugar and 2) also supplies essential nutrients (being obese & malnourished are not mutually exclusive).
I like the Jaminets’ Perfect Health Diet, but any diet that eliminates or at least reduces modern foods (especially added sugars, refined grains, and vegetable oils) and incorporates healthful whole foods is a good start.
I also think that including healthy fats is critical, for both satiety and nutrition. I eat pastured eggs, raw butter and braunschweiger made from grass-fed cow liver in order to get important nutrients like choline, K2 and vitamin A.
Your mileage may vary, but I find that when I’m eating a healthy, “clean” diet, I don’t feel the urge to overeat on a daily — or even weekly — basis. And the garden variety triggers (like coworkers bringing in goodies) aren’t a problem at all. So for me, healthy eating is the foundation.
Mind
Alas, if only a healthy diet was enough! But if you’re like me, once you get over the initial hurdle, you’ll be rolling along fine, maybe for weeks or months. And then, boom. Life happens.
I went thru this twice last year, once after Christmas and once after Easter (long story about holidays with family saved for another time!). Alas, the after Easter roller coaster lasted about six months — and I gained back all the weight I’d lost. So when I got back on track this past fall, I knew I needed to add something more to my plan than just a healthy diet.
Taming my lizard brain. Now here’s the realization I finally had, months after the Easter relapse — one that my well-meaning therapists, who over the years tried and tried to get me to “just sit with” my feelings never suggested to me — that the key was to work on dealing with triggers well before they happened.
For me, this has meant neurofeedback — essentially brain-based biofeedback. I first read about this in Nora Gedgaudas’ book Primal Body, Primal Mind. A few Google searches later, I learned that neurofeedback has been researched as a treatment for addiction. As I believe that much of the physiology of overeating (mine anyways) is based in addiction-related pathways, I thought this might be the key to real freedom from overeating for me.
Now, 50 sessions of neurofeedback later, I am cautiously optimistic. It’s been almost surreal, because although I am still “triggered” occasionally (e.g., some situation will push an old childhood button), it happens so infrequently that I find I actually can sit with it when it comes up — or be able to consciously take an action that will relieve it in a healthier way.
If that doesn’t work (sigh, there was the take out from Jerry’s after a ridiculous traffic jam on I95 heading back to DC one weekend), I have found it easier to get back on track right away.
The downside. But while I think neurofeedback rocks (as does Bulletproof Exec’s Dave Asprey), it’s not particularly accessible for most, as health insurance typically doesn’t cover it. [As an aside, if you have the $$, I think it's worth it ... I spent far, far less on neurofeedback than I did on years and years of therapy with IMO much better results.]
However, I’ve also been incorporating other meditation-related practices into my efforts that are more affordable. And for someone whose issues aren’t as severe as mine, these may work really well.
Not enough?
Of course, a healthy diet and stress management may not be enough for everyone (e.g., when emotional/compulsive overeating is connected to relationship problems or grief or other issues that would benefit from another type of support).
But it might be worth an experiment. Take a couple of weeks — or better, 30 days — and follow both a clean eating program *and* some type of meditation practice (and from my perspective “modern” and/or “assisted” meditation is fine) and see how your overeating and/or cravings respond.
We’re all different, so for some, this may work great. For others, it may not be enough. Michael Prager lays out a compelling story as a man who has been very successful following a 12-step approach, and he has a great resources page. Also check out Green Mountain’s article on emotions and food and Something Fishy’s website and forums.
As someone who could be a poster child for BED, I wrote this simply because I think it’s worth considering that addressing the physiological first may be a good strategy for what appears to be primarily psychological. But we’re all different, and what’s important is what works for you!
Thanks for this post. Digging pretty deep here. Your’s is a headstrong, head-centered journey, that still has heart and soul, and I appreciate that. As you’ve probably figured out, my technique is to surgically separate “body management” from my emotional/relational life, and to appreciate, cultivate, nurture the latter while keeping the former going, regardless of my attitude toward it in any particular day. (Maybe I’d find neuro-feedback useful in that pursuit.)
Thanks also for linking to Dave Asprey. Never had heard of him before. Made me go hmmmm. My initial take:
Very bright man (since I agree with him a great deal - har).
Too confident in his conclusions/assumptions.
His results are too good to be universally true/applicable for all people.
Possibly manic.
Would benefit from some humility.
Some interesting stuff, nevertheless.
He has done some extensive reading, but selectively (as we all must). I looked mostly at his diet. He’s pretty confident in his valuations of various foods, but my experience is that we nearly daily learn something new about the micro-qualities of them. People ask him questions, and he shoots back with unflinching certainty.
I am leary of all “motivational” people or people who position themselves as inspirations. “Bulletproof” is one of the most interesting adjectives I’ve seen. Better than the trite “Revolutionary” or “Breakthrough,” I suppose, but it triggers the red flags nonetheless.
The upshot: I’m glad you follow him, and when YOU find something valuable there, I’ll jump to the link, but I’m not going to spend my time keeping up with him. I fear he’s on path for a crash-and-burn, but I can’t tell you why I have that feeling.
Debra, thanks for the comment. Re Dave, yes, I can see your point, but right now, I’m a fan. I greatly appreciate the fact that he’s not making outrageous claims and then hiding the details behind a paywall.
For example, I think his bulletproof diet is brilliant. I particularly like the way things are on a continuum rather than black/white and good/bad.
Do I agree with everything? No, but that’s par for the course in the world of nutrition where I don’t think there’s anything that is universally accepted!
As far as humility goes, well, yeah. But he seems to be in good company on the blogosphere on that score ;).
Re neurofeedback, I like to think of it as essentially computer-facilitated meditation. I think it works the same way as other meditative techniques, but just faster. In my case, it’s because I am intolerant of frustration — and a geek. So Having the immediate feedback of the beeps (as well as the distraction of something to focus on) works really well. This is why I think the “assisted” or “modern” tools (even if it’s just listening to classical music) are really promising for those without the resources to do full-blown neurofeedback.
I have found the very same thing to be true as well. If the composition of my diet is good, I don’t “overeat.” It seems that what I eat determines how much I eat, how hungry I am, and what cravings I have.
A diet that is low in sugar, high in protein and good fats, and moderately low in carbs does wonders for me.
Great post!
Thanks so much! I think that there’s been *way* too much focus on quantity (re: calories in vs out) and too little on quality.
Art DeVany made a comment a while back about obesity reflecting brain “starvation” … and although he meant glucose, I think it’s also a reflection of just how nutrient-poor the standard Western diet is, especially as far as fat-soluble vitamins go. Larry McClearly may be right: feed your brain, lose your belly!
Thank you for you wonderful summary of most of the issues of weight loss. There is one missing, that is unexplained excessive hunger.
Fred, thanks for the kind words! Not sure what you mean re “unexplained excessive hunger” tho.
Well, Beth, I guess what I could ‘a said, simply, is that I find you — in your cerebral, un-modified by adjectives way — more inspirational than many of the people who inspire you.
Thanks … right back at you!!
So. Much. Here.
Really informative stuff. I agree with the chinese perspective you cite, re: not two things connected but one system.
Don’t know if you saw Dr. Sharma’s post about ADHD, last Saturday, but it was interesting to me because I hadn’t made a connection between my weight loss and my treatment for ADHD. I realize now that I often ate particular foods (wheat, especially!) and amounts in an attempt to self medicate my hyperactivity, which explains why I used to gain considerable weight during finals week in college when I was cramming and staying up for days. I was *using* substances in food to help me focus and stay alert, probably jacking my blood sugar around something fierce, too. It would be interesting to find out what specific substances were in the foods that helped me manage ADHD symptoms…because they worked, but at a serious price in terms of long-term health and weight gain.
Thanks for so many interesting links!
I enjoyed your post. I also like that you made the distinction of appetite and hunger. The way I describe it to my patients is that hunger is a component of appetite and it is very difficult to know how much of ones appetite is hunger or behavioral issues. For patients that opt for weight loss surgery that curbs hunger, the majority find that it is a large component of their appetite and therefor they are able to lose weight. For a subset the non-hunger related appetite is more of an issue. Part of what a good quality weight loss program does is help these patients to work on these issues.
I love your post! I totally agree that emotional eating is intimately tied to physiology.
When we don’t eat foods that disrupt or psychology (sugars, allergens, grains, veg oils) we don’t get easily perturbed, hence are much more resilient in hardship.
I would say the emotional element looks more like this: Sweet food and non-foods taste really good. Who doesn’t want them. We get in a bad mood and suddenly we don’t care any more what happens to us. We don’t care about the repercussions. It’s not so much that we’re overeating as a way to pacify our emotions (although, there is something to that because some foods do release drug like chemicals) but because we just throw our convictions out the door. This world is so full of temptation. We don’t live in the simple Paleolithic times. We have to constantly fight. It’s not emotional, it’s normal!
I agree with Mark on your split between appetite and hunger. I think appetite should be further parsed: triggered appetite is different from impulse appetite.
A triggered appetite happens when a desirable food (an image or actual availability) triggers a want for food. The impulse appetite is what I struggle to define and fight as a weight-loss maintainer. When I find my hand on the refrigerator handle and I only vaguely recall how or why I got to the kitchen, I’m dealing with an annoying but very real impulse. I have to consciously fight it off. If I don’t, I will eat something almost mindlessly (nowadays that would generally be a high-fat protein, such as nuts or cheese or carrots dipped in nut butter, but at other times in my life — before I’d literally taken them off the table — grain-based carbs were my impulse foods of choice). I think these “eat impulses” are driven by a lot of the same endocrine that expresses our emotions. Hence, a lot of people would want to call this emotional eating, but I’m not comfortable with that. It’s not like I have an experience or recollection that triggers an emotion that then leads to eating. Instead, it’s a subconscious impulse that just pulls me to the refrigerator door, sans any specific emotions and sans physical hunger.
I’ve been wondering about this for a while, how much my food problems were due to emotions, and how much was just bad nourishment, usually because I was trying to lose weight in stupid ways, from before I was even overweight. In my eyes, these days, poor blood sugar from instable, low-nutrient, high calorie food was likely the cause of my weight issues that still plague me to this day.
Live and learn, I guess.
Catching up on your blog just now, and can I say how much I am grabbed by your curiosity, sleuthiness, and thoughtfulness. Struggle with different mind/body issues-around depression and its repetitive behaviors which are very addiction-like-and its intriguing to think about how much of our behavior and well-being rides on our ability to distinguish between what we are physically feeling, our emotions, and the chains of behavior we build between them.
I thought I was an emotional eater. Happy, sad, angry, bored, I would eat for every emotion or occasion or all hours of the day. I decided to try cognitive therapy to work on how I thought of food and reform my negative eating habits.
I was surprised to learn that all my triggers are unrelated to food. Overeating, cravings and food obsessions are reactions to decades of dieting. Obsessively following (or not following) diet rules created anxiety with food and eating. I also learned that anxiety can manifest itself as hunger.
So with my therapist, I developed strategies to manage my food/eating/dieting related anxiety. And it’s working, my cravings have decreased, along with episodes of overeating, and I’m actually (for the first time) excited to eat healthy foods (always felt like an obligation). Sure, some days my confidence wanes, but I’m in a much better spot than I was a year ago.
Physiologically speaking, now that my psychology is excited to eat healthy foods, my body seems to be following suit.