How to Measure Emotional Eating

Pay attention to your eating habits to recognize emotional eating.

People who eat to satisfy emotional hunger -- often stemming from stress, anger or sadness -- may be engaging in emotional eating. Physical hunger spurs a person to eat to satisfy a physical need. Emotional hunger may tempt a person to eat to try to satisfy an emotional need. Unfortunately, eating to satisfy emotional hunger often leads to weight problems. Pay attention to your daily diet to enable you to measure emotional eating. If you recognize a problem, you can take steps to stop emotional eating.

Things You'll Need

• Notebook

Instructions

1. Keep a food journal for at least a week to document what, when, and why you eat. Write down everything you eat throughout each day, and beside each meal or snack you enter into the journal, make a note about when you ate, why you ate and how you were feeling as you ate. For example, you might enter: "Bowl of cereal -- 8:00 a.m. -- hungry." Another example might be: "Granola bar -- 1:30 p.m. -- bored."

2. Analyze the food journal after keeping it for a week. Look at all of the times you ate from hunger, and cross these meals and snacks off in your food journal. Look carefully at the meals and snacks left after you cross off the hunger eating. The eating that remains in your journal is likely emotional eating.

3. Examine the kinds of emotions that trigger emotional eating for you. Depending on what's going on in your life, you may find yourself eating from anger, sadness, excitement or boredom. If you find specific triggers that lead to emotional eating, make a plan to counteract these triggers with a different response. For example, when you get mad, instead of heading to the freezer for a quart of ice cream, take a walk, take a shower or write a few paragraphs about how you're feeling.

4. Plan to eat regular meals and snacks throughout the day. If you keep yourself satisfied, not letting yourself get too hungry or over-extended, you'll be more able to change emotional eating patterns.

5. Pay attention to every morsel of food you put in your mouth. Emotional eating is often something that people do without even thinking about it, and without paying much attention to taste or food sensations. Slow down and enjoy your food, tasting each bite and enjoying the flavors.

Tips & Warnings

• If you feel out of control and need outside intervention, contact your physician for a recommendation for nutritional or psychological counseling.

References

• MIT Medical: Overcoming Emotional Eating

Resources

• Fattitudes: Self Test for Emotional Eating