Q. What Is Emotional Eating?

A. Emotional eating is the way you approach food when you're eating for psychological reasons rather than for sustenance or for the simple enjoyment of the taste experience. Emotional eating is so common that it's almost invisible.

When emotional eating rules, food is no longer food. Instead, food becomes a psychological prop, an extension of mind. The urge to overeat has little to do with taste-a few bites can satisfy the taste buds. Rather, we use food as a natural means of self-medication, as we've been doing since infancy when we first cried out for milk and in response received not only milk, but also human contact and maybe even love. In infancy we learned that food brings comfort, and we've been relying on food for far more than mere sustenance ever since.

When you overeat, it most likely has nothing to do with hunger or even with the pleasure you derive from food. Instead, most of us overeat to give ourselves a reward, or to fight off depression, or to avoid a problem or control an angry mood. When we withhold food from ourselves, we experience it as a form of self-inflicted punishment and it causes us a real sense of deprivation. We use food to cope, to satisfy our emotional hunger rather than our physical hunger. According to national obesity expert Dr. John P. Foreyt, of Baylor College of Medicine, emotional eating is the number one predictor of weight-loss relapse.

Our own study of 17,000 dieters confirms this fact. We asked respondents which factors made them turn to food for relief from stress. Two thirds said they broke their diets when they were highly critical of themselves, and one half said they relapsed when they were depressed. Like these people, you need to learn to stop emotional eating or you will never be able to lose weight and keep it off.

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