Emotional Eating

It’s a well-known fact that either positive or negative emotional stimulation cause emotional eating. Because negative emotions and stress related physiologic reactions resembles feeling of fullness after eating, poor appetite and decrease in the food intake are considered natural physiologic reactions of negative emotions. However, increase in the food intake related negative emotional state called ‘’emotional eating’’ and considered as ‘improper’ reaction. It’s shown that this reaction of excessive eating in the face of negative feelings are existing among obese individuals, women with eating disorders and normal weight people going on a diet. Therefore, it’s argued that relation between emotions and eating is affected from individual characteristics at least to some degree.
 
Emotional eating is defined as eating not because it’s time for meal or social need but eating just responding to affects. It’s demonstrated that emotional eating triggered from negative emotions and done often secretly and done at home not outside. Emotional eating is associated with low self-esteem, feeling of inferiority and eating disorders. In the same time, emotional eating is more common among people with higher Body Mass Index (BMI) and people who struggle with weight control. McCrone and colleagues (2000) showed that eating respond to negative emotions is more frequent than eating in the feeling of hunger among women with early onset obesity.  Emotional eating is also seen in people with normal weight and this is related to bulimic eating behaviors. It’s argued that emotional eating caused by individual’s improper coping mechanism.

It’s commonly held that eating behaviors aligns to emotional states. Many researches investigate relationships between meal frequency, how much is eaten, what is eaten and psychological needs. It’s accepted that there is a strong relation. Mehrabian investigated relation between meal portion and different emotions. According to that, surplus of food intake happens in time of  boredom, depression, fatigue and  poor food intake happens in the time of fear, nervousness and pain. Lyman demonstrated that, when positive emotions exist there is tendency to healthy food intake, however, negative emotions triggers unhealthy eating. Patel and Schlundt found that in positive and negative mood people eats more than neutral mood also, positive mood has a more obvious effect on food intake than negative mood. Macht investigated that anger, fear, unhappiness and happiness effect on eating behaviors. This research, demonstrated participants felt more hunger in anger and happiness than fear and unhappiness. During anger there is an increase in impulsive eating characterized with rapid, irregular and careless eating, however, during happiness there is an increase in eating delicious and healthy food which may be called as hedonic eating.