People often wonder what causes one person to be an emotional overeater versus another person. After all everyone is wired with emotions and everyone goes through sadness, anger, etc so why does one person suffer from this disorder opposed to someone else? Here are some thoughts as to why this happens.
The disorder emotional overeating is a broad term. It actually refers to any eating habit where a person eats without genuine hunger being the real reason they eat. Meaning, an emotional overeater will get a sudden intense craving for a specific food but it’s not motivated by real hunger because if offered something else besides that craving they wouldn’t eat it. When real hunger is the motivating factor for someone to eat they are open to pretty much any type of food not one specific thing.
Emotional overeating disorder is more prevalent in women than it is men. This does not mean that men don’t suffer from it it’s just not as common as it is among women. Emotional overeating causes a person to turn to food to comfort them instead of dealing with their feelings, mostly negative feelings.
Past Trauma
It has been found that most people who suffer from the emotional overeating disorder have been through some sort of trauma in their past like sexual abuse. The person turns to food to ‘stuff’ their feelings and not deal with the anxiety, anger, etc they felt at the time(s) of the abuse. The stuffing of these emotions causes the person to gain weight and in the end making that person feel protected because they won’t be attractive to the opposite sex. The person doesn’t want to be attractive and this is sometimes done subconsciously while other times it’s a conscious thing. It’s not just sexual abuse that can cause a person to become an emotional overeater, other factors like not having basic needs met (like the love of a parent, etc) can make it happen too.
Poor Self-Image
Emotional overeating is more common in those people that lack self-confidence or have a poor/negative self-image. In a way, emotional overeating is a physical expression of what the sufferer feels inside, and the resulting weight projects the same image of self-disrespect.
Self-Medication
Just as alcoholics use alcohol as their drug of choice and heroin addicts use heroin, food is the emotional overeater’s drug. Alcoholics drink to numb their pain or take their stresses away, heroin addicts do the same and so do emotional overeaters. Food numbs them and their feelings.
Depression
Research has shown that there is a strong correlation between emotional overeating and depression. While depression can cause someone to overeat, it can also have the opposite effect. The worse depression gets it can cause an emotional overeater to stop using food as their coping mechanism meaning they’ll lose weight.
Stress
Cortisol is one of the hormones your body releases when you are stressed. Cortisol is known to have a hunger stimulating effect. So, the more stress a person is under the more vicious the cycle of emotional overeating usually is.
Individual Triggers
Each person is going to have their own trigger or triggers that cause them to overeat. But some of the more common triggers that all emotional overeaters usually experience are:
* Boredom
* Oral need or a need to satisfy your mouth's need to do something
* Social pressure or embarrassment at eating in public, resulting in overeating in private
* Financial stress
* Relationship difficulties
