Seeking solace by overeating

Distracting techniques and finding a more nurturing inner voice can help address emotional eating, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL

JANET JACKSON has done it. Myleene Klass grapples with it. And Oprah Winfrey has openly charted her own struggle around it to millions of viewers and readers.

Could you be doing it too? Could “emotional eating” be sabotaging your attempts to reach or maintain a healthy weight?

“It’s a huge area,” says Dr Eddie Murphy, principal clinical psychologist with the HSE and an expert panellist on the recent RTÉ series Operation Transformation. “Emotional eating is where some people eat because the triggers are emotional, so they can be stress and anxiety, sadness, depression.”

Emotional eating is different from eating that’s triggered by habit or situations, like having a cup of tea and chocolate every evening in front of the TV, he explains.

“That’s more of a situational, behavioural trigger,” he says. “The real powerful mood is where you have very strong feelings and you use food as a way to comfort yourself.”

That element of “seeking solace in the external” is a key to understanding emotional eating, according to Murphy, and recognising it can help those who turn to food for comfort to address their overeating.

But first they need to get a handle on just what they are doing and keep a diary to pinpoint their mood triggers, he notes.

“All the evidence around people who successfully lose weight is they need to track – what gets measured gets done,” he says. “It’s important that with a food diary we would look at the mood when the person is eating, so that we can identify and target when a person is eating because of their emotions.”

With the triggers nailed down, the person can then work on distraction techniques to avoid overeating in response to an emotion.

“The person is more conscious and says ‘I won’t start eating now because I am depressed, I am going to engage with a different task’ – maybe make a phone call, read a book, go for a walk or watch a TV programme that gives you a lift,” he says.

“And any time you come to choose food, whether it’s buying in the supermarket or cooking at home, you are at a choice point and you say is this going to help me reach my goal or is this going to hinder me?”

These tactics of conscious distraction and substitution will help, but there could be other issues that need to be tackled too – sometimes emotional eating can be tracked back to a specific trauma such as childhood abuse, notes Murphy.

“Some people may come with deep-seated psychological issues. They may have been sexually abused as a child and they use eating as a comfort, but also they may use eating in a way to make themselves so big that they make themselves unattractive. Those individuals need psychological therapy,” he says.

“They may be in a place where their current coping mechanism is emotional eating and you want to move them towards a journey of freedom where they can accommodate [their past] in a new future that shows their strength and their resilience.”

However, he stresses that many emotional eaters will not have had such abusive experiences, and that more generally, a lack of self-esteem can underlie mood-triggered overeating.

“Self-esteem is a bigger issue. If you define what self-esteem is – ‘I am loveable’. For people with low self-esteem, in their script it’s ‘I am unloveable’,” he says.

“A lot of people with weight issues have low self-esteem but they come across as bubbly. They put themselves out there for others. But they need to learn to internally soothe themselves. People are soothing themselves using junk and convenience foods, and not learning to soothe themselves appropriately.”

Relaxation techniques or meditation may help to quell the emotions that trigger overeating, but people also need to readjust their internal voice to a less punitive and more nurturing one, according to Murphy.

“Rather than being hard on themselves, they [need to] use a voice they would use to offer advice to a friend: ‘You are going to get through this, you are a great person’. It’s about helping people to be fair to themselves.”

'FOOD DOESN'T FIX THINGS, YOU HAVE TO FIX THINGS YOURSELF'

LAST YEAR, mother-of-one Anna Naughton from Virginia in Co Cavan came to a crunch point. She weighed 13 stone and 4lbs, her heaviest ever, and she knew she needed to change her path.

How did Naughton get here? It started after her son, Luke, was born, she recalls.

"I had postnatal depression and I was really panicked and anxious. Then Luke was only eight months old when my dad died really suddenly, and three months after he passed away my mother-in-law was diagnosed with terminal cancer."

She turned to food as a crutch. "I was so emotional and down and upset, the only thing I did find comforting was food. Then when I had finished eating for comfort and had something I shouldn't have eaten, I was so down I would have more food," she says. "I felt really sluggish and unhappy."

Naughton applied to take part in the RTÉ series Operation Transformation, where she became a leader, and it soon became obvious that psychology was the big factor for her.

"For me it was definitely realising that if my mind wasn't great, if I wasn't in a good frame of mind, then nothing else was going to change," she says. "The food doesn't fix things, you have to fix things yourself."

The programme encouraged her not only to eat healthily and to exercise but to respond to mood triggers with activities other than eating.

"I'd go and read a chapter of a book, play with Luke, go for a walk, anything to distract yourself from that instant where you reach for food and it's gone almost before you even know you have eaten it," says Naughton, who has now shed over two stone.

"It's one big circle, the fact that I feel and look physically better makes me happier, I'm less likely to [overeat] and [then to need to] lose weight again."