Do Food Cravings Reflect Your Feelings?

How to overcome emotional eating

by Star Lawrence
WebMD Weight Loss Clinic Feature

The boss snaps at you & you feel like biting his head off. Instead, you grab some chips from the vending machine & CA-RUNCH! Or your kids are on an overnight, you've got no one to talk to & you feel sort of hollow inside -- doesn't a cupcake or bowl of ice cream sound delish?

This is emotional eating, says Linda Spangle, RN, MA, a Denver weight-loss specialist & author of Life is Hard, Food is Easy: The 5-Step Plan to Overcome Emotional Eating & Lose Weight on Any Diet.

It's yesterday's news that people don't eat just when they're physically hungry. In fact, we're such a generally well-nourished nation that Jane Jakubczak, RD, LD, student health center dietitian at the University of Maryland in College Park, estimates that emotional eating accounts for 75% of all noshing. People eat for all sorts of reasons besides physical hunger; stress, boredom & depression are just a few.

"We're trained at a young age to use food for comfort & reward," Jakubczak says.

What is new is Spangle's theory -- observed over 16 years as a weight-loss coach -- that people's food choices tend to correlate to the type of emotions they're experiencing. If you look at the foods you crave, Spangle maintains, you can tell what you're feeling.

Feed Your Head?

One form of emotional eating stems from what Spangle calls "head hunger": an urge to eat stemming from intellectual sources such as stress, anger, frustration, an upcoming deadline, or being misunderstood. If the food you crave is chewy or crunchy, "something you smash your teeth down on," Spangle says, you're experiencing head hunger.

"I teach people w/head hunger to look at what they really want to chew on in life," Spangle says. After they have identified what they would actually like to crush between their teeth, Spangle asks them, "Will that chip really change the situation -- will it do the trick?"

Here are some highly textured foods that signal head hunger, according to Spangle: Chewy cookies or bars, M&Ms, steak or chewy meats, granola, trail mix, fried foods, chips, nuts, popcorn, crackers, french fries, hot dogs, pizza & chocolate.

Food for the Heart

The minute Spangle thought "pasta," she stopped herself: "Instead, I asked myself, 'Why am I feeling sad & empty?'" Of course, it was because she had been alone all day.

Spangle defines this kind of "heart hunger" as a response to the "empty" emotions, such as loneliness, depression, boredom & that feeling that something is missing.

If you seek comforting foods such as ice cream, pasta, cinnamon rolls, cheese, eggs, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, biscuits, cake (especially cheesecake), alcohol, candy & other foods that have a fond spot in your memory (say, Mom's favorite recipe), you're likely experiencing "heart hunger."

Here's another clue. "If you're hungry & don't know what you want, this is usually heart hunger," Spangle says. That phrase "I don't know what I want" is the tip-off. That's when you should ask yourself: "What am I missing?"

In the case of her lonely evening, instead of going out for pasta, Spangle finished making the salad, put it in a special bowl & went to the prettiest spot in her house to nibble on it.

She also put on some favorite music & delved into a course she had been working on. Later, she made some lunch dates & vowed to go to some networking events. The evening passed swiftly, along w/her hunger.

Get a Handle on Emotional Eating

Not everyone believes emotional eating can be so easily categorized.

"I find that some people like salty, crunchy foods & some like sweets," Jakubczak says. "When they eat for reasons other than hunger, they pick their preferred food. I haven't seen a connection between selection & the type of emotional eating."

Jakubczak agrees, though, that people should get more in touch w/ the reasons they're eating.

"I have my clients keep a food journal & rate their hunger from one to 10 every time they eat something," she says. "One is 'Starving, can barely crawl to the refrigerator' & 10 is 'Thanksgiving-stuffed.'" Before starting a journal, she says, most have no idea of how often they're eating w/out really being hungry.

Neither Spangle nor Jakubczak recommends that people try to simply ignore their cravings when they recognize they're eating out of emotional hunger.

"I would never pull food away from someone w/out giving a replacement," Jakubczak says. "It would be like pulling the carpet out from under their feet."

Instead, they suggest substituting some non-food activities to fill the void. Here are some ideas:

• Get moving: run upstairs, go down the hall & talk to a co-worker.
• Put on some music.
• Get outside & take a walk around the block.
• Read a non-work-related, entertaining magazine for 20 minutes.
• Take 7 slow deep breaths.
• Play w/the dog.

Or, Jakubczak says, try substituting a healthier food for whatever it is you're craving -- yogurt for ice cream, e.g. (By the way, she says, substituting carrot sticks for potato chips doesn't work! You might try baked chips instead.)

But Do I Really Need It?

The conventional wisdom used to be that if you craved something (click here to read an article about "craving" midway down the page), your body needed a nutrient found in that particular food.

With the possible exception of chocolate, which contains the feel-good brain chemical called serotonin, Spangle disdains this explanation. "Many people would rather blame their physiology instead of doing the work of sorting out their emotions & taking care of those needs," she says.

If eating carbs makes you crave more carbs, Spangle says, this may be partly due to your physiological makeup. But to stop eating the extra carbs, you need to examine the reason for the emotional eating.

So take a look at the food you're holding in your hand & ask: "Who do I want to chew out?" "What's missing in my life?" Or just: "Why am I eating this?"

The answer could help you stop eating when you're not hungry & put you on the road to dealing w/your feelings in a more productive way.

Published June 16, 2003.
Medically reviewed by Charlotte Grayson, MD.

Sources: Linda Spangle, RN, MA, author, Life is Hard, Food is Easy: The 5-Step Plan to Overcome Emotional Eating and Lose Weight on Any Diet. Jane Jakubczak, RD, LD, student health center dietitian, University of Maryland, College Park. Linda Spangle's web site, www.foodiseasy.com: Beware of the risk of "emotional eating" by Lori Silverstein.