Hot to Overcome Emotional Eating Using Mindfulness Meditation

Science confirms the surprising result of my mindfulness meditation practice — it can be a powerful tool for getting a more rational relationship with the food you eat

As a teenager, I struggled with bulimia. Not only did I eat to manage my emotional states, but I also binged and then tried to compensate for my dietary transgressions. This never-ending cycle was so draining that I could not think of anything else but food.

Stopping binge eating required a shift in my beliefs about my worthiness and my ability to cope with stressful situations. I used food to suppress three negative emotions in particular: powerlessness, anxiety, and emptiness. Fortunately, with the assistance of a psychiatrist who helped me change some aspects of my negative and restrictive mindset, I beat bulimia. This was a turning point in my life.

I made remarkable improvements. But emotions such as loneliness, boredom, unhappiness and even excitement still triggered my appetite. I still made bad choices for my mental and physical wellbeing and was prone to emotional overeating. I still used food to avoid unpleasant emotions.

Ultimately, however, the real solution to overcoming emotional eating is not to avoid but to accept a variety of emotions, including negative ones, because they are a healthy part of life.

So how did I finally break my emotional eating habits?

With mindfulness meditation.

I didn’t start mindfulness meditation with the idea that it would help my emotional eating. As a life and health coach, I was so passionate about self-development that I could not refrain from experimenting with mindfulness.

Little did I know that mindfulness meditation would help me embrace whatever emotion arose without using food or anything else to suffocate it.

In this article, I’ll share the science about why this approach worked for me, tell you about my mindfulness meditation practice and get you started on your own practice.

Mindfulness meditation will not cure an eating disorder. For that, you should seek professional help for a complete program of care. But mindfulness practices can be extremely beneficial to anyone who wants to change their food habits by examining some of the underlying sensations that can lead to emotional eating.

The Science of Mindfulness Meditation for Overcoming Emotional Eating

After I realized that mindfulness meditation was unexpectedly helpful in dealing with issues around eating, I started looking at the research behind it. What I found was that academic research does support the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation, and that there are several explanations for why it works.

A systematic review published in Eating Behaviors in 2014 by Katterman et al. confirms that mindfulness meditation can help individuals scale down emotional eating and decrease binge eating episodes. Mindfulness practices are being integrated with existing therapeutic models, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Why is mindfulness so efficacious? There may be several explanations.

Many people suffering from eating disorders such as binge eating or emotional eating experience guilt and shame after episodes of compulsive eating, not to mention self-esteem issues. These negative judgmental feelings trigger the continuance of the eating patterns in what can feel like an endless self-perpetuating loop. Mindfulness meditation, however, promotes a nonjudgmental observation of reality. A nonjudgmental (and even compassionate) mindset helps people embrace a variety of emotions, including negative feelings, without actively trying to suppress or change them with food.

Mindfulness is a great tool to acknowledge behaviors that are otherwise automatic. When emotional eaters repeatedly use food to cope with emotions, the reward centers in their brain are stimulated through an increase in dopamine. The memory of the reward is also reinforced multiple times, leading to the creation of a habitual behavior. This pattern is especially pronounced when it involves highly palatable foods that are loaded with sugar, salt, and fat — foods that compromise appetite regulation. Once the habit is created, emotional eating becomes automatic. Mindfulness is a powerful ally in the fight to break this cycle and bring awareness back into the equation. When an event triggers an emotion, emotional eaters, instead of eating rewarding foods on autopilot, can learn to stop, observe the situation, and choose to react in a different way.

Mindfulness of bodily sensations can help emotional eaters recognize cues of hunger and satiety, making it easier for them to recognize immediately when they are about to eat for reasons that are not related to their physical hunger. In addition, mindful and slow-eating exercises can help break the cycle of “reaction” eating triggered by stress or nervousness. (This can also have benefits for people who want to work toward weight loss, because slow eating gives the body those 20 minutes it needs to send the satiety signal to the brain, making it easier for the person to not overeat.)

According to Kelly McGonigal, author of The Willpower Instinct, meditation strengthens the functions of our prefrontal cortex. This frontal and rational part of the brain, which is engaged when you resist urges that arise, is our willpower house. Emotional eaters frequently battle with the urge to eat when they are not physically hungry. By developing the prefrontal cortex, anyone can get better at observing their impulses without acting on them. The prefrontal cortex is a wonderful ally in shifting unwanted habits and building desired ones.