Emotional Eating

Emotional Eating is a term used to describe using food to provide emotional comfort or relief. Whether you're bored, feeling down or anxious food can provide temporary sensory pleasure.Sweet foods like chocolate, ice-cream, cakes and biscuits enable a temporary "high" and are known for their mood changing properties. Sugary food can release the "feel-good" neurohormone Dopamine, the same chemical released by some recreational drugs. Sweet foods may lift your mood temporarily, only to lead to inevitable weight gain later. Weight gain leads to lower self-esteem, which in turn leads to more comfort eating leading to further weight gain - it's a vicious cycle.

It is important for people to determine whether emotional causes such as loneliness, sadness, boredom, stress, etc lead to "comfort eating". Any weight loss plan that doesn't take this into account is likely to fail. At the beginning of each course of therapy each client completes an Emotional Eating questionnaire and is asked to complete an Emotional Eating Diary. This helps me to identify any emotional causes linked to eating patterns and enables my therapy to target the roots of the problem. I will then help you to find healthy ways to feel better about yourself instead of snacking on high-calorie foods.