Did you reward yourself with one big pizza or half of a chocolate bar after a long day at school or after submitting an assignment? These may be some examples of emotional eating. When we are stressed, anxious, or just bored to escape negative feelings – we eat. That’s been in our DNA since ancient times when there were still battles in the Colosseum and ancestors were stressed and needed a lot of calories before fights. 

According to some research, 75% of people experience emotional eating, at some point in their life, you may be a part of that number yourself. However, emotional eating isn’t only associated with bad feelings, for example, at parties, holidays, and celebrations we all like to eat a little bit more than we usually do due to different reasons – a variety of food, your favorite dish from home or just the good company that you’re with.

If you're curious about whether you might be an emotional eater, below are 5 questions to ask yourself that can possibly provide you with more insight.  

If you want to better manage the moments you find yourself eating emotionally, below are some tips we gathered: 

• Am I having a problem with food? – when you admit to yourself that you have a problem, you can start working on the solution. 
• Research more information on how to eat more balanced – start enriching your knowledge about food and how you can deliver your body the needed vitamins and minerals. 
• Make the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger – start asking  yourself “Am I actually hungry or am I eating because I feel something like stress, sadness, boredom, anxiety, etc.?” Physical hunger develops over time, we eat and after a few hours we are hungry again and when we are hungry, we desire several types of food. Unlike emotional hunger, our desire is reduced to certain types of food like chocolate or something sweet. Another red flag of emotional hunger is that you think that this food would make you feel better, but sometimes it only leaves you feeling guilty or shame-filled. 

• Control over the stress in your life – according to psychologists 40% of people eat more when they’re stressed. 
• Control over food intake – most of us have a cupboard full of sweets in case of an “emergency” (stress) situation. The first step is to say 'bye' to this cupboard of your home. According to the Wansink experiment, people consume more food if it is easily available to them than when it is more difficult to obtain (Wansink et al., 2006). 
• Start keeping an emotional diary – start writing every night with a few sentences about how you felt during the day, what you ate during the day etc. That would make you recognize your emotions. 
• Develop a distracting system – give yourself some distraction if you recognize that you’re under the control of emotions. 
• Positive self-talk – recently, I watched a part of Jay Shetty’s podcast with Megan Trainor and how her psychologist gives her the task of looking at herself in the mirror for 5 minutes. The first time she failed to look at her body for 5 minutes, but every time after she found something 'cute' about her body that gave her confidence. (Small change from the author: think about 1 characteristic and 1 body part of you that you think is 'cute') 

How to cope with stress? (Tips and tricks)  

In many cases, emotional eating is linked to stress or being in a high-stress environment. Working on reducing your stress can be a sure way of working on emotional eating tendencies. To help you with this we have compiled a list of tips and tricks.

• Stretching/ fitness – if you’re not the biggest fan of the gym, you can watch some of the videos of Pamela Reif for a home dancing workout (it’s fun, I promise you, or at least more fun than a gym ;)) 
• Reading books/ listening to podcasts – those activities take you to another world where you don’t have deadlines, annoying colleagues, or dirty roommates. 
• Talk with your friends – it’s always nice to hear your best friends and to share your problems. You may be surprised to hear that you’re not the only one going through the same or just have a nice conversation on a topic that you’re interested in. 

• Good sleeping habits – I know it’s hard with university and maybe work to sleep the recommended amount of 8 hours but here you can find some tips for better sleep: 
  • Put your phone away 1 hour before sleep, as the blue light from the phone is bad for your quality of sleep 
  • Reading before sleep trains your brain and prevents you from the risk of Alzheimer’s. 
  • Drink chamomile tea because it's caffeine-free and known for decreasing anxiety. 
• Balanced eating – your body needs to consume all the nutrients from dietary sources for proper body functions. For example, people with low vitamin D are more predisposed to stress and depression. Some foods that are enriched with vitamin D are mushrooms, eggs, salmon, and tuna fish. Also, vitamin C helps with reducing stress; foods like mandarins and oranges are full of this vitamin. Moreover, the scent of the orange is also related to stress relief. 

How to distract yourself from eating?

• Drink water – sometimes you can mix the signals of your body when it's thirsty or hungry. It might be worth trying to have a glass of water before eating something, to see if you are really hungry or just thirsty. 
• Take a small walk – you can go to throw the trash away or just enjoy the last moments of good weather but that helps you forget for a few minutes about the food. 
• Start reading books/listening to podcasts/watching YouTube – that will not only distract you but also may enrich your prior knowledge.
• Use the SWAP technique – Say (say how you feel), Wait (slow down the reaction),

Address the feeling (stress, anxiety, boredom, depression, and what I can do else to not feel the same way), Persuade (persuade another activity) 

We may all experience emotional eating during some part of our lives in positive or negative ways. We eat every day, a few times a day and we should think of it as an experience of discovering new flavors and new world not as a coping tool to escape some feeling. Do you have some tips on managing stress or dealing with emotional eating? Send us an email at hub@buas.nl and we can share them with the BUas community.