If you work with people who struggle with regulating their food intake, the chances are that at least some of your work involves emotional eating.
Emotional eating is the tendency to overeat in response to negative emotions, irrespective of feelings of fullness. In other words, it refers to eating in order to soothe or neutralise an emotion.
In theory, emotional eating can include eating to celebrate good feelings, but eating in response to anxiety, anger, boredom and depression is associated with poorer wellbeing, whilst overeating in response to positive emotions is not (Braden 2018).
So I’m most interested in helping people to reduce their reliance on food when they feel bad.
Emotional eating is complex
I’ve noticed that emotional eating gets talked about as though it’s a thing. In other words, a relatively simple entity. Working with clients and reading the literature on emotional eating (and noticing what’s happening when I’m doing it myself) tells me it’s not simple at all.
It sure is important though – people can feel really frustrated by the way that their efforts to eat healthily seem to be thwarted by what happens when they are blindsided by an unpleasant feeling. It can lead to feeling a bit out of control around food, and around feelings.
Alexithymia is a risk factor for emotional eating
One of the fundamentals of dealing with emotions is being able to notice and describe them, so that you can communicate what you’re feeling to someone else maybe. But even more importantly, so that you can recognise for yourself what is happening inside you emotionally so that you can choose how to respond.
The inability to express, describe or distinguish between emotions is called “alexithymia”.
Alexithymia isn’t an all-or-nothing thing. We vary in the extent to which we are able to notice what we are feeling and put a name to the emotion – some of us have learned to do this better than others.
And within ourselves we probably experience degrees of alexithymia at times. There are days when I’m not sure what I’m feeling, or what to call it, and this may be true of many of us who are otherwise able to recognise and label our emotions.
Possible mechanisms of how alexithymia relates to emotional eating
In a recent paper, McAtamney et al (2023) conclude that there is consistent evidence of a relationship between alexithymia and emotional eating, but little knowledge of what the mechanisms underpinning this association might be.
They summarise the two models that have been suggested:
- Alexithymia involves a deficit in interoceptive awareness, resulting in insensitivity to satiety cues, so that people are more likely to eat in response to other bodily sensations such as emotional arousal.
- Eating is a way of regulating negative affective states which are common in alexithymia, meaning that emotional eating is a maladaptive form of emotion regulation.
Both of these could be true.
McAtamney and colleagues conclude that for people with greater difficulty discerning what they feel and being able to put that into words (higher levels of alexithymia), focusing on noticing and labelling feelings should take priority. As they say, the ability to identify and understand emotions is a logical pre-requisite to developing skills to regulate them.
What happens in the brain when we name what we’re feeling?
There are some fascinating research findings on what happens in our brains when we put a name to what we are feeling. Lieberman et al (2007) used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain changes when people put names to emotions.
Labelling the feeling produced when they were shown negative emotional images diminished the response of the amygdala and other regions involved in emotional processing. Additionally, emotion labelling produced increased activity in a single brain region, part of the prefrontal cortex. These results suggest that simply labelling an emotion may diminish emotional reactivity via a pathway from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala.
How can we help clients who struggle with alexithymia?
This is one of the topics I cover in my Masterclass on Emotional Eating. Being able to explain the relevance of difficulties with emotion naming helps clients with emotional eating understand that what they need is not another diet but a bit of help responding to emotions differently.
I developed this Masterclass in order to share insights and techniques from psychology with colleagues from all disciplines, that you can use in your work with clients who want to reduce emotional eating.
In the Masterclass I present a curated summary of relevant research on the development of emotional eating, so you can share that with your clients.
I then give you a range of tools that you can use immediately with your clients to help them notice and name what they are feeling, and evidence-based techniques that can help them manage those feelings without turning to food.
As with all my training courses, this Masterclass puts the emphasis on what is clinically useful when you are working with someone who is struggling with emotional eating, so that you can enhance the work you are already doing. It’s about adding new tools to your existing range of professional skills and the feedback from professionals who have already attended the Masterclass suggests that this is exactly what people get from attending!
I enjoyed the masterclass on Emotional Eating which was informative, research-based and compassionately run. I learnt a lot about the psychology of emotional eating and how to tackle it with new useful techniques including ACT which will help with my client work.
I loved the Emotional Eating Masterclass! It gave me a good understanding about the emotions involved in emotional eating and what personal values are behind them, as well as tools and techniques to apply in my nutrition clinic
The Masterclass is approved for 6 hours of CPD by
- The British Psychological Society
- The British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine
- The UK and International Health Coaches Association
The cost of the Masterclass is £165 including all the materials and lifetime access to the recording
References
Braden et al (2018) Eating when depressed, anxious, bored or happy: Are emotional eating types associated with unique psychological and physical correlates? Appetite, 125: 410-7
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting Feelings Into Words. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
McAtamney 2023 A systematic review of the relationship between alexithymia and emotional eating in adults. Appetite, 180: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2022.106279
Hello,
My name is Samira.
I have graduated Neuroscience.my thesis is based on emotional eating.
I am really into taking your master class but I have difficulty for paying tuition.Can you help me?
Dear Samira, thanks for getting in touch and a great topic for your thesis.
I don’t have a reduced rate for the Masterclass, but there is a module in my “Appetite Retraining” online course on Emotional Eating.
If you are interested in that, please go to this link and choose the “Session 4” on Emotional Eating
This course is designed for a general audience but has the key points in it so you might find that useful.
The “Appetite Retraining” course is only available until the end of September so if you do want to buy that module, please keep that in mind as it will not be available after that time.
Best wishes Helen McCarthy