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I have been both a Binge Eater and an Emotional Eater!
When does indulging in your favourite snack cross the line from comfort to concern? I crossed this line in my teenage years when I ate 70 Cadbury Cream Eggs over a couple of months. It's embarrassing to admit that. I was tiny as a 15 year old, 6 and 1/2 stone (41 kg) at 5 ft 1" (I never grew any taller!). I push biked or walked everywhere, ate healthy food at home, but still thought I was overweight. I reconnected with primary school friends and changed my habits to some unhealthy ones. Eating a lot of crap was one of them!
I was brought up in the diet-heavy decades of the 70's and 80's. By the time I was in my 20's it was the early 90's and ingrained in me that I had to be thin to be of any value. I had many periods of binge eating over the years. I never became overweight until I turned 40 developed an autoimmune disease called Hashimotos. During this time, I ate extremely healthy, exercised, practiced yoga, swimming, walking, did all the things we are told to do, but I gained 20kg in a few months. I was also under extreme financial stress from circumstances outside of my control. This led to a period of sickness that I had never been prepared for. I had to physically lift my legs to the floor to be able to get up in the morning while still going to work and running a household of teenagers.
How did I overcome this and recover? I started treating myself as a client. I practiced what I preached and committed to having patience in not expecting a quick fix. When it did happen, I felt like it happened instantly! But looking back it was over a year of being mindful of eating, exercising, and social activities.
What is the difference between Binge Eating & Emotional Eating?
The difference between emotional eating and binge eating lies mainly in how much food you consume. But, other key features may help you distinguish between the two and put an end to unhealthy snacking.
Emotional Eating
Stress manifests in different ways, but most of us can relate to the concept of emotional eating. Ever catch yourself wallowing in a container full of ice cream or a large packet of chips after a particularly stressful day? Emotional eating or stress eating is when you consume food not out of hunger, but out of anxiety, frustration, or sadness. For some, emotional eating is triggered by a particular traumatic event but for others, it can just be a habitual reaction to financial or emotional turbulence.
But don’t worry- emotional eating is somewhat normal, and in some cases, better for your mental health depending on how you handle it.
In fact, emotional eating can be great for relieving stress with THE RIGHT FOODS, provided it doesn’t get too out of hand. Eating puts our body into a state of relaxation by activating the parasympathetic nerves. Indulging in and savouring the flavours of food feels good and can lift our moods instantly.
But when emotional eating no longer relieves but rather contributes to stress, it can get out of hand.
At a point, emotional eating gives way to self-loathing as we feel ashamed of our indulgence. We want to hide our “binging” episodes, but because of a lack of other emotional coping mechanisms, they spiral out of our control.
To prevent emotional eating from advancing to the next stage, we need to tackle the problem at its roots: stress, frustration, and other emotional ruts.
Take up meditation or yoga to simultaneously tackle stress and improve your self-discipline. Engage in a stress-free activity like painting or fishing and take plenty of time to distance yourself from whatever may be causing your stress - whether that is work, a stressful home environment, or relationship woes.
To make sure your stress eating never borders on binge eating, keep a food journal. Records of your day-to-day eating choices will help prevent you from putting on unwanted kilos and improve your overall mindfulness when it comes to consumption.
And finally, to manage your emotional eating in a far more healthier way, look for healthy alternatives to your favourite go to snacks such as oven baked sweet potato fries instead of the regular deep fried kind or carrot sticks and hummus instead of crisps.
Binge Eating
Binge eating, unlike stress eating, is considered by nutritionists as a potentially severe eating disorder. Characterised by constant overconsumption, BED (Binge Eating Disorder) involves consuming huge quantities of food in a relatively short span of time. It’s not just your average bloated belly after a heavy dinner, but a constant overeating that leaves the body uncomfortable and unhealthy.
The transition from emotional eating to binge eating occurs when you lose your sense of control: you move from being conscious of your reason for eating and how much you eat, to eating without any control over intake. It often leads to guilty eating, which is worse for your mental health and stress levels as well.
This leads to a vicious cycle: your stress turns into binge eating, and your binge eating fuels your stress.
What’s worse is that the guilt of binge eating (which usually occurs when alone) traps us in a “shame cage”- we don’t want to reach out to friends or family for fear of revealing ourselves.
But BED is too serious of a condition to keep under wraps. Instead, it is vital to talk to someone if you are experiencing any one of its symptoms. Your attitude towards your body image, your history with other mental health complications, and eating habits in general could be contributing to BED.
Total recovery from binge eating is absolutely possible. It doesn’t need to take over your life. To start your healing process I encourage you to keep a food journal to track your habits to work out the emotional triggers that affect your binge eating and the thoughts and feelings you have while on a binge episode. This gives you amazing insights into the WHY of your situation so that you can easily manage the HOW of getting out of it.
Remember to remain body-positive. I am always here to talk if you need to. As part of my 8 Week Skin & Hormone Essentials program, I discuss both these topics and how to overcome them. You can learn more here
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