Emotional eaters
Emotional eaters — people who eat when they are lonely or blue — tend to lose the least amount of weight and have the hardest time keeping it off, U.S. researchers said.
They said the study may explain why so many people who lose weight gain it all back.
“We found that the more people report eating in response to thoughts and feelings, the less weight they lost,” Heather Niemeier, an obesity researcher at The Miriam Hospital and The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, said in a statement.
“Amongst successful weight losers, those who report emotional eating are more likely to regain,” said Niemeier, whose study appears in the journal Obesity.
The study included 286 overweight men and women who were participating in a behavioral weight loss program.
A second group consisted of more than 3,300 adults who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for at least one year.
Niemeier and her team analyzed responses to an eating inventory questionnaire.
Emotion Eaters are often at a loss to explain why the pounds they’ve lost creep back again, and they may blame themselves for their lack of willpower. But, in truth, it’s really a lack of self-awareness that’s to blame — not being aware of what it is that drives them to eat so much.
Here are the characteristics:
The Emotion Eater only overeats when she’s feeling a strong emotion, such as anger or depression.
The Emotion Eater frequently overeats immediately after getting home from work.
The Emotion Eater tends to eat whenever she is bored.
Sometimes, out of the blue, the Emotion Eater finds that she is incredibly hungry, and she almost feels as if she’s starving for food.
The Emotion Eater usually feels uncomfortable openly displaying or talking about her feelings.
The metaphysical basis of emotion eating is a belief that other people keep interfering with her attempts to fulfill her life purpose. She believes that if only her children, neighbors, boss, co-workers, teachers, parents, and lover would cooperate, she could get to work on her purpose.
The affirmation for the Emotion Eater is:
“I am the sole creator of my life. I choose now to put loving, creative, and consistent energy and enthusiastic effort into discovering and fulfilling my life purpose. I take total responsibility for structuring my time.”
One of the main “problems” that Emotion Eaters face is that they feel hungry a great deal of the time. Their solution in the past has been to eat every time they felt hungry. Unfortunately, since they were often so hungry, this meant that they would eat a lot of food and gain a lot of weight in the process.
They focused on people who ate because of external influences, such as people who eat too much at parties, and people who ate because of internal influences, such as feeling lonely or as a reward.
What they found is that the more a person ate for internal reasons, the less weight they lost over time.
“Our results suggest that we need to pay more attention to eating triggered by emotions or thoughts as they clearly play a significant role in weight loss,” Niemeier said.
Emotion Eaters must become acutely aware of their motivations for wanting to eat. You need this awareness in order to tell whether your stomach’s actually empty or you’re upset about something and just want to eat to feel better. First, spend the next week analyzing the feelings you have when you’re hungry. The best way to do this is to keep a journal recording how you feel before, during, and after you eat. The journal is a black-and-white way of finding patterns in the emotional reasons why you overeat.
Second, the next time you feel like eating, ask yourself if you could possibly be upset instead of hungry. Don’t go to the kitchen automatically when you feel hunger pangs. Instead — and this is important — give yourself a mandatory 15-minute “time out” whenever you think you’re hungry.