Emotional Eating and Mindfulness

Have you ever reached for a tub of ice cream after a tough day, only to regret it later? You’re not alone. For people who struggle with emotional eating, it can feel like there is no easy solution. But in a new 2024 study published by Shireen et al. (2024) in the journal Mindfulness, researchers found that even a short meditation session can help reduce people’s cravings and negative emotions around eating.

Emotional eating happens when you eat food to deal with negative emotions, like stress, anger, depression, loneliness, and many more. Food can provide a short escape from these emotions that you might not want to feel, but usually the guilt and weight gain that result from emotional eating make the emotions worse in the long run. This creates a cycle that is very difficult to break: you feel a negative emotion, so you overeat to distract from the negative emotion, but then you feel even worse afterwards. The diagram below shows how the cycle of emotional eating happens.

People eat emotionally even when they aren’t hungry. This means that people can be left feeling helpless and that the food is controlling them, not the other way around. In the same way, people who eat emotionally can often feel very strong cravings to eat something, even when they don’t necessarily even want to. Although “liking” and “wanting” something usually go together, in certain cases like drug addiction and eating disorders, people can want something without actually liking it. For example, you may not even enjoy eating an entire bag of chips, but the craving feels irresistible, like a reflex. In fact, neuroscientists have found separate parts of the brain involved in “liking” and “wanting”.

These factors make emotional eating a very difficult problem to address. Because of the negative effects on a person’s weight and emotions, and that emotional eating is hard to treat, a strong solution is needed to break the cycle. That’s where meditation comes in.

Meditation has been shown in past research to disrupt rumination, which is related to emotional eating. Rumination is when you experience repetitive negative thoughts that make you anxious. When repeated, thoughts like “I will never get a job” or “Why did I say that to him?” are called ruminations. Researchers at McGill University offered an explanation for how rumination is related to emotional eating: people eat food to distract themselves from ruminations. If rumination is one of the root causes of emotional eating, then a good solution to emotional eating would need to target rumination. Because of this, researchers thought that meditation, which has been proven to stop rumination, would probably help emotional eating too.

For the study, the researchers gathered people who have had issues with emotional eating in the past, but did not have eating disorders. First, the researchers asked participants to remember and talk about a recent time when they ate emotionally. Then, participants rated their mood and hunger cravings. Researchers split the participants into two groups. The first group listened to a 15 minute guided body scan meditation - this was the meditation group. A body scan is a type of meditation that is shared by many different traditions of meditation. It involves breathing into your stomach, and directing your attention to different parts of your body, one at a time. It is a simple exercise that can help you pay more attention to your body, and it can also help you stop getting so caught up in your thoughts. The diagram below shows the basics of a body scan meditation.

The second group listened to a 15 minute audio recording about human anatomy - this was the control group. Afterwards, both groups rated their mood and hunger cravings again.

What did the researchers find from this study? The main finding was that the participants who did the body scan reported significantly lower food cravings and negative mood after the meditation. On the other hand, the participants in the control group reported no change in their level of food cravings or mood after listening to the anatomy recording. Essentially, the body scan did two things that the anatomy recording did not. It weakened the powerful desire to eat food that many of these participants felt. It also made them feel better, or at least, less bad about themselves. This finding is shown in the graphs below.

With the results in mind, what are some things we can take away from this paper? There are 3 main takeaways:

1. If a body scan meditation can reduce cravings and negative moods around food, it is a good solution to emotional eating. Cravings happen when we want something very powerfully, even sometimes when we know that thing is not good for us. This is how emotional eating occurs, so because the body scan reduces cravings, it should also reduce emotional eating. In relation to negative mood, we know that emotional eating can happen to avoid negative thoughts about yourself. We also know that negative thoughts about yourself can sustain the cycle of emotional eating. That means that if the body scan meditation reduces negative moods, people will feel less reason to eat emotionally, and they won’t get caught up in the cycle of emotional eating as easily.

2. Even a single session of body scan meditation can reduce cravings and help emotional eating. In the past, some researchers have focused on how months-long meditation workshops can help emotional eating. This study was the first of its kind to study how a single, 15-minute body scan might help reduce emotional eating. This means that a short body scan is a tool that you could use in the moment when you feel the urge to eat emotionally. For example, if you know that you had a hard day and feel a strong urge to overeat when you come home, you could pause and do a short body scan to reduce the cravings. You can feel confident that there is scientific evidence for the benefits of what you are doing.

3. Investing in education about meditation may be one solution to the obesity epidemic. There are countless reasons why obesity and heart disease are rising, and emotional eating is only one of them. However, body scan meditation is a low-cost, low-time intervention that has already been shown to reduce emotional eating. Along with pursuing other solutions, governments interested in reducing obesity in their populations might think about starting an educational program to teach people about the benefits of body scans on emotional eating.

Overall, the researchers found that a short body scan meditation is a good way to reduce food cravings and negative mood around food. These two results give a potential solution to people who feel that they cannot control their emotional eating. In the future, research may be able to tell us more about how and why body scans are so helpful for reducing emotional eating. But for now, the next time you feel the urge to eat emotionally, take 5-15 minutes to do a body scan – it might make all the difference.

Images

fuelmedia. (2021, April 2). April is Emotional Overeating Awareness Month - NEW Health Center. NEW Health Center. https://newhealthcenter.org/april-is-emotional-overeating-awareness-month/

Govanhill Baths: Mindfulness Body Scan. (2020, June 9). Govanhill Baths. https://www.govanhillbaths.com/card4/

‌Ramsøy, T. Z. (2023, April 17). Unlocking Customer Satisfaction With Wanting and Liking -. Thomasramsoy.com. https://thomasramsoy.com/index.php/2023/04/17/unlocking-customer-satisfaction-with-wanting-and-liking/