Do You Need Eating Disorder Therapy?

Emotional eating is usually driven by some kind of emotional trigger such as depression, anger, fear, celebration, happiness, frustration, or sadness. If this doesn't sound familiar to you, you may be in the majority of people who don’t recognize the emotional aspects that go along with eating habits.

That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that you need eating disorder therapy or any other kind of eating disorder treatment for that matter. Some simple exercises may be all you need to get past a troublesome food addiction or eating habits and finally experience the weight loss you crave.

It isn’t unusual to not be aware of the factors that impact emotional eating. In fact, many of the choices and decisions we make each day have emotional components to them before we even have a chance to make rational decisions. Because of years of exposure to friends, family, and advertising, we are subconsciously conditioned to think that food simply makes us feel good.

Food does fill a real biological need in us, and that is that the body needs energy to burn. But emotional eating only causes us to use food to fill other voids that are emotionally oriented and that should be filled in other ways.

There is a fine line between emotional eating and a full-blown eating disorder, and it can be difficult to know which category you are in. Eating disorders such as binge eating disorder or compulsive eating goes beyond the basic behaviors of emotional eaters.

There are specific characteristics that are evident in people who have full-blown eating disorders. They regularly binge or eat large amounts of food very rapidly. People with eating disorders will ‘feel’ out of control or even obsessed with food.

Other behaviors that distinguish a person with an eating disorder from emotional eating is that those with eating disorders tend to hide food around the house, or they may eat in hiding. For instance, the primary shopper may purchase foods that they hide from the rest of the family and then eat later when they are alone.

Many people who have both eating disorders and who are avid emotional eaters as well, have experienced a traumatic event in their lives such as physical or sexual abuse. The percentage of people with eating disorders who have experienced this abuse is higher than those with simple emotional eating.

Since binge eating is not as well known and recognized as anerexia or bulimia, people may not even know that they have a medical disorder, and this is just one of several challenges that binge eaters face. People who suffer from eating disorders should never attempt to ‘go on a diet’ but should, instead, seek the advice of a trained licensed therapist who can uncover potential problems and give a proper diagnosis.

While people who have significant emotional eating habits aren’t at the medical and psychological risk that people with full-blown eating disorders are, many of them still suffer just as much.

Control of emotional eating starts with self-awareness of the problem, and then self-management. Self-awareness is the most difficult part since it involves the acceptance that you have a weakness that has caused you to be overweight or even obese, and you weren’t just ‘born’ that way.

You can begin to evaluate your emotional eating habits by keeping a short 4-5 day diary. It's important to note each time you eat - not what you eat but the time of day and how you are feeling each time you reach for another morsel of food.

If you first acknowledge that there WILL be a feeling there for you to discover, you will find that identifying that emotion becomes easier each day.

At the end of the 5th day you can look through your diary and note how many times you ate because you were, or thought your were, hungry.

Evaluate that number, the times of the day and the emotions that seemed to be involved in the automatic reach for food. And being dishonest here will not help or hurt anyone but yourself.

The next step in your evaluation is self-management. Like anything else in life, the longer you do something the easier it gets. Practice really does make something - if not perfect - at least easier.

You can choose to do this part on your own if you wish but you will have better chance at success if you enlist the help of a partner – or at least a calendar.

Continue to note the times you eat and your emotional reasons why. As you are forced to write before you eat, and read the reasons why, you will be encouraged to put that food down when you are depressed, fearful, angry, or on an emotional high.

The act of emotional eating will decrease and you will in time stop binge eating in its tracks. You will also be surprised when you begin to actually feel feelings of hunger again. And all without the time and expense of eating disorder therapy!