You’re really struggling in the evenings with overeating
As the nights draw in, evenings take on an autumnal feel. You’re less likely to be outside and much more likely to be on the sofa, watching TV.
Of all the segments in the 24-hour cycle of our lives, evening is the one where people struggle most with their eating.
Whether you’re rewarding yourself after a hard day or looking for comfort, evening is the witching hour for Emotional Eating.
Your weight is affected which in turn has led to health issues
This nightly unintended eating isn’t trivial – if it were, there would be no problem. But if your evening eating feels out of control, your health can suffer.
Metabolic disease, heartburn and mobility issues may develop over time. And with them, feelings of self-loathing and hopelessness.
Why evenings?
If your overeating happens in the evening, the chances are that your circumstances are different from daytime –
- You have down-time when you’re not occupied so your mind is free to wander
- Your energy levels are low as it’s the end of the day, so it’s harder to resist when tempting foods are nearby
- You may be trapped at home, feeling restless
- Difficult feelings may show up more intensely than during the day
What is driving your evening overeating?
This is the key question. Not all evening eating is the same. In fact, not all Emotional Eating is the same. People eat in response to different feelings.
For Sandra, it’s loneliness and grief
Sandra’s evening eating is a way of managing emotional pain.
She has always cared for people and animals, but the loss of her husband last year and the death of her much-loved dog have left her reeling. To make things much harder, just before the start of the pandemic, Sandra and her husband moved hundreds of miles to start a new life. Lockdowns made it hard to meet new people. In a short space of time, this energetic and gregarious woman’s social world shrank, like a cashmere sweater in a hot wash.
Now that she’s on her own, her evenings are really difficult emotionally, as it’s then that she feels the loss.
Diets only make things worse
Emotional eating is fundamentally about emotions, not so much about eating. It’s important to recognize that your eating is the attempt to cope with the emotion.
If you try to cut down on your eating, you might unwittingly be removing your key coping strategy. In which case it could make things worse, not better.
Emotional eating researcher Dr Tatjana Van Strien* says that people with high levels of emotional eating should not focus on calorie-restricted diets but on emotion regulation skills.
In fact, she adds that restrictive dieting is itself a risk factor for emotional eating. So, if you’re pushing yourself to follow a weight loss diet but can see that emotional eating is what’s driving your over-eating, please ditch the diet!
Emotion regulation
Learning how to regulate difficult emotions will help you at all times, not just the evenings.
Negative emotions are aversive states – we want to get away from them. It’s natural to try to do something to get rid of a horrible feeling, but what I know as a Psychologist is that this ‘experiential avoidance’ keeps us stuck in a cycle of feel-avoid-repeat.
When you learn how to free yourself from this cycle, you no longer need food in the same way.
Eating your feelings
The alternative to avoiding painful feelings involves developing a new skill, of emotional flexibility. This means a gentle shift from avoiding the feeling to being willing to experience it, whilst you take action, however small, in line with what matters to you.
As you learn to turn towards the uncomfortable feeling with curiosity and self-compassion, you become an observer of what is happening within you. This creates a mini-distance between you and the feeling, and means that you now have more resources available to you. When you’re overwhelmed by a feeling, you have little access to your thinking brain. But by observing and slightly detaching, your rational mind kicks back in.
Getting off the feel-avoid-repeat carousel
What we’re talking about here is learning how to respond to unpleasant feelings that you don’t yet know how to manage.
In other words, learning how to respond to the thing that is driving the eating. In Sandra’s case loneliness and grief, but your evening eating may be driven by other feelings – the need to de-stress, for example – or your need to manage feelings of anger if you’ve suffered betrayal.
Want to learn how to achieve emotional flexibility?
Learning how to respond to distressing feelings without eating is absolutely life-changing. It is gentle, powerful and freeing.
To dip your toe in the water, there is an excellent booklet produced by the World Health Organisation which is free to download. It’s accompanied by audio tracks with specific exercises to help you learn these skills in practice.
WHO guide to Doing What Matters in Times of Stress
If you’d like my professional help with reducing emotional eating for weight loss or for your overall health and wellbeing, click on the link below to apply for a free Eating Pattern Analysis call with me.
* Reference
van Strien T. Causes of Emotional Eating and Matched Treatment of Obesity. Curr Diab Rep. 2018 Apr 25;18(6):35. doi: 10.1007/s11892-018-1000-x. PMID: 29696418; PMCID: PMC5918520.
Photo by Roxana Zerni for Unsplash