Why Unwinding with Food can Backfire

Have you ever reach for a glass of wine after a long day? Or a bag of chips?
Do you find that you feel just as tired or stressed after eating? 
Although food can sometimes be a comfort, it rarely decreases stress or fatigue (unless of course you are hungry and lacking calories).

Reaching for food to unwind at the end of a long day usually backfires. Not only does it rarely help with boosting energy levels, but some people become more stressed once they start to think about the calories they ate. This is especially true for people who don't eat intuitively or are chronic dieters. If you are counting calories or are desperately trying to lose weight, any overeating or indulgence usually evokes panic. Feeling like any unplanned eating is a catastrophe tends to make things worse, evoking feelings of "what the heck, I've already ruined my diet, I might as well keep eating". Whereas if you eat intuitively, you are likely to stop eating before getting too full, will naturally compensate at the next meal and are thus more comforted by food.

If eating doesn't help you feel better, you've essentially wasted that precious time you could have spent doing something that would actually help you feel better. Next time, before reaching for something to eat or drink, take a moment to think about what you are feeling. If you are not hungry, will food make you feel better? Has this way of relaxing or de-stressing ever worked? Ask yourself "what am I going to get out of eating this?" before eating mindlessly.

Before eating for comfort, as yourself "what am I going to get out of eating this?" - tweet this!

In fact, a study published in Health Psychology found that so-called comfort foods didn't actually comfort participants any more than other foods did or even more than those who ate no food. 
In this study, the participants were given a food they found comforting, a food they enjoyed but didn't expect to be comforting and no food at all. They were instructed to rate their mood after watching a video and found that the results were the same across the board- comfort food did not improve mood better than other foods or no food. Moreover, the amount of food eaten did affect mood so there was no correlation between the amount eaten and the comfort received. They also found no correlation between the expected degree of comfort and a change in mood. In other words, even though participants thought some foods would comfort them more, they did not.
Although this study was not a very big one, it raises some interesting questions!

Here is a fantastic list of things that better nourish our mind when stressed that is from Psychology Today: http://bit.ly/1L3CH2h

This graphic outlines some ways to destress without food from this list.

Stop emotional eating (for your sake and your children's)

The more I speak with people about dieting or weight loss, the more I realize that emotional eating plays a huge role. In my defense, I am not the instigator of this topic (and have a hard time talking about it with people outside of the consult room) but it does sometimes feel like an inevitable topic, especially with strangers.

There's the tired cliché about women who are sad, reaching for chocolates to sooth but emotional eating goes much more deep than this. Eating to spite someone (or go against their "helpful" diet advice), eating due to happiness or celebration and eating due to loneliness are all examples.

Stress is perhaps the biggest culprit. Stress from work, home or social life has been a huge influence for many of my clients. It's not always obvious to them but most evening snacking sessions can be due to stress from the day. Making time to reduce stress and have a few moments to breath during the day can help reduce relying on food's ability to calm you down at night. Things like "I deserve this snack because I worked so hard all day" or "because I skipped lunch" or "taxied everyone around this evening" are not uncommon reasons we give ourselves to eat when we are not hungry. It is important to eat foods you love, to eat when you are hungry and to sometimes eat for pleasure rather than necessity. However, eating to reduce stress is a vicious circle, Especially if you are doing it on a regular basis. Most people who are not mindful eaters tend to increase feelings of guilt and anxiety, rather than feel comforted, when eating comfort foods.


Focusing on eating when you are hungry and asking yourself "why do I want to eat" before reaching for food when you are not, is just one way to start being more aware of emotional eating. Of course, the biggest issue with emotionally driven eating is possible weight gain and not being hungry at meals.


Another reason for reducing emotional eating was recently highlighted in a study involving children and parents. It found that offering food to children to soothe their "negative emotions (i.e. sadness, anxiety, etc) was the number one thing parents can do to encourage emotional eating by the child. Unfortunately, the impact of the parents doesn't stop there. The study also suggested that the parent's "emotional feeding practices" (i.e. emotional eating) can influence their children's emotional eating. So it is suggested that there are two ways to reduce emotional eating in children- stop using food to ease their negative emotions (i.e. ice cream to ease sadness or to cheer up the child) and take a look at (and stop) the parent's own emotional eating.

You can read more about this study (Associations between child emotional eating and general parenting style, feeding practices, and parent psychopathology) here.