What Triggers Emotional Binge Eating and What To Do Instead

Binge eating is about the food AND it’s about so much more than the food. It’s complex. There are lots of triggers. Here’s what we know can influence binge eating:

• your overall diet and food choices

• your mental and emotional health

• your genetics

• your environment

• life events

In spite of these complexities, can we find a common theme for what triggers binges or overeating episodes?

But First - It’s About the Food

Before digging into the emotional aspects of binge eating, it’s important to note that:

food restriction (aka not eating enough)

and food avoidance (aka not eating certain forbidden foods)

are common causes of binge eating. So first, learn to respond to hunger and fullness cues through intuitive eating and work with a dietitian. This ensures your nutritional needs are met and help you to include all foods in your diet.

I often see a dramatic decrease in binge eating after my clients start eating more. Eating enough throughout the day is a fairly straightforward way to remove the trigger of hunger before we head into emotional triggers.

Understand Your Triggers - It’s About More than the Food 

Let’s take a look at the non-hunger-related events that trigger a binge.

Do you binge because you:

• Feel lonely, bored, or in a low mood

• Feel stressed, overwhelmed, out of control, or over-stimulated

• Feel inadequate, insecure, guilty, or worthless

• Feel angry, irritable, or resentful

• Broke a food rule, like eating a sweet you normally avoid

• Want to numb out or experience release

• Feel uncomfortable in your body / Negative body image

• Avoiding a specific task or decision

• Feel uninhibited while using drugs or alcohol

• Tired

• Stressed / Unbalanced schedule / Lack of self-care 

What is the underlying emotional issue underneath nearly all of these binge triggers?

Avoidance, or wanting to suppress these unwanted events.

Of course, each person struggling with binge eating has triggers and life experiences that differ from the next person that can be addressed in-depth individually. I don’t want to minimize these unique challenges by using a generalization. However, avoidance is a common theme I’ve found in my clients and in the research.

Psychological researchers* have studied experiential avoidance and define it as: 

1. The unwillingness to remain in contact with a negative private experience (including bodily sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories, and behavioral predispositions) and

2. Action taken to alter the experience even when it’s not immediately necessary

In my nutrition practice, the most common reason for bingeing is to numb out or escape. Can you relate?

You want to avoid negative feelings. You want to avoid facing a mistake that you made or a conflict you’ve had recently. You want to avoid feeling uncomfortable in your body. You want to avoid empty space in your day because you don’t know how to slow down and rest. You want to avoid the overwhelm and stress you’re feeling.

So you go to food to numb out and distract.

The Problem with Avoidance

As you probably know, avoidance is a temporary distraction. It won’t make the feeling, thought, or sensation disappear permanently. You will feel uncomfortable again in the future. 

For example, you arrive home from work with your head full of stressful thoughts. Tasks and deadlines amp up your anxiety. In order to avoid these thoughts and feelings, you binge.

After the binge, you experience additional unpleasant sensations:

• physical discomfort that may prevent you from your evening plans

• guilt about eating food that was meant to be shared

• worry about what the binge eating is doing to your body.

The next day, the tasks and deadlines are still waiting for you at work.

Another problem with avoidance is that you often don’t realize you’re doing it, so you’re missing out on the opportunity to choose your reaction. It is living life on automatic pilot. 

Avoidance results in being controlled by thoughts/feelings/situations instead of making deliberate choices and living life with intention.  In the example above, avoiding the unpleasant feelings about work prevents you from acknowledging your limits and setting boundaries at work.

The Antidote to Avoidance

I wish I could offer you a quick fix or a guaranteed, step-by-step protocol to solve this problem once and for all.  Instead, I invite you to shift your perspective and engage in an ongoing process of acceptance.

The antidote to avoidance is acceptance. 

Acceptance is making room for what is happening in the moment. It requires you to be present and curious. 

Acceptance is pausing to acknowledge discomfort. It is knowing that suffering is part of the human experience before you head into problem-solving mode.

Acceptance is not approving of, giving in or settling with a situation. Nor is it wallowing in one’s feelings. 

Acceptance is like being still and allowing yourself to float instead of thrashing and flailing deeper into your problem.

Authors Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson state that acceptance is being “intentionally open, receptive, flexible, and nonjudgmental…with respect to moment-to-moment experience”*. 

Imagine a small child who is tearful. Avoidance is immediately distracting this child with a lollipop or a toy. Acceptance is kneeling down, looking at that child in the eyes, and bearing witness to what she is experiencing. Which do you choose?

Acceptance Can Allow You To Live with Intention

After you’ve paused to accept, you might then have the capacity to change something about your situation. Acknowledging and sitting with your distress can give you the power to move on intentionally. This is the alternative to automatic pilot.

For example, you’re normally triggered to binge when you get home from work. So you’ve been practicing acceptance during that transition by journaling or deep breathing. Some days, you still binge after. Some days, you don’t.

Either way, pausing to accept can allow you to see the situation more clearly. With less distractions, you can make changes, such as setting certain boundaries at work.

Ways to Practice Acceptance

If you want to experiment with the process of acceptance, and don’t know where to begin, try the following strategies to regularly pause, check in with yourself, and notice your internal experience.

1. Take mindful breaks throughout your day. Acceptance requires you to slow down, so practice pausing even when you’re not feeling particularly avoidant. Walk away from your desk for a few minutes every hour. Go outside. Take 4 deep breaths before you start your car. Sit down with a cup of tea after you put your child down for a nap. Set aside productivity and allow yourself to just be for a minute without external stimulation like texts or social media.

2. Learn how to check in with your internal self. During a mindful break, turn inward and ask how you’re doing. You can start by mentally scanning your body from head to toe. Emotions are often first sensed in the physical body. If a particular sensation sticks out to you, like a tense jaw or hunched shoulders, pay attention to the feeling, take your time, and ask yourself what emotion it may be pointing toward. Find a description or even a picture of how you’re feeling without trying to necessarily figure out where it came from or how to change it.

3. Notice urges. During the time of the day that you’re most prone to bingeing, take a mindful break to sit with binge urges. Observe what an urge feels like in your body and what your mind is telling you in the moment. Experiment with journaling for 5 minutes about what you notice before you start to binge. The goal is simply to increase awareness during this vulnerable time, so even a 1-minute pause before a binge is progress.

4. Learn about ACT. If the concepts of avoidance and acceptance resonate with you, learn more by reading books, listening to podcasts, or finding meditations on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

Practicing acceptance is one skill that has the potential to reduce binges and emotional eating. If you need more help, set up a call with me to learn more about nutrition counseling. Find a mental health therapist who specializes in binge eating to support you in the process. You don’t need to look a certain way or have an eating disorder diagnosis to receive help for your eating struggles. 

Sources

*Chawla, N., & Ostafin, B.D. (2007). Experiential avoidance as a functional dimensional approach to psychopathology: An empirical review. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 63, 871-890. 

*Hayes, S.C., Strosahl, K.D., Wilson, K.G (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy; The Process and Practice of Mindful Change. New York: Guilford Press.