Occasional emotional eating is normal. Everyone has celebrated with food before, that's what birthday parties, Christmas lunch and BBQ's on SuperBowl Sunday and the Forth of July are all about. But emotional eating can become a serious problem when it leads to negative emotional and physical imbalances in our lives.

Frequent emotional eating can easily become a destructive cycle. Emotional eating becomes entrenched in the lives of its sufferers when they use food to regulate their mood, cope with stress or overcome feelings of anxiety or boredom.

This type of behaviour can easily lead emotional eaters to become overweight or obese because many of them feel hungry most of the time.

"Satisfying" this insatiable hunger with food, many emotional eaters consume far more calories than their body needs and they gain a lot of weight which becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible to lose.

Common signs of Emotional Eating

Here are some common signs of emotional eating:

• Eating when not physically hungry.
• Eating during times of strong emotions, like anger or depression.
• Eating when bored.
• Rapid eating.
• Eating immediately after arriving home from work.
• Eating alone out of embarrassment at the quantity or type of food being eaten.
• Eating until uncomfortably full.
• Feelings of disgust, depression, or guilt after overeating.

Recognizing emotional hunger

Recognizing emotional hunger (as apposed to real physical hunger) is one of the keys to overcoming or staving off frequent emotional eating.

Some of the characteristics of emotional hunger include:

• Emotional hunger comes on suddenly.
• One minute you're not hungry at all and the next minute you're starving.
• Emotional hunger often craves specific food, like pizza, candy or a cheeseburger.
• Emotional hunger begins in the mouth and the mind, not the stomach.
• Emotional hunger often accompanies an unpleasant emotion.
• Emotional hunger involves automatic or absent-minded eating.
• Emotional hunger isn't satisfied when you're full.
• Emotional hunger makes you feel guilty.

Are you an emotional eater?

To find out if you might be an emotional eater, rate yourself on the following statements about your current lifestyle (adapted from the book Fattitudes: Beat Self-Defeat and Win Your War with Weight, by Jeffrey R., Ph.D. Wilbert, Norean K. Wilbert, St Martin's Press, NY, 2000.) using the scale:

0 = Never

1 = Rarely

2 = Sometimes

3 = Often

4 = Almost Always

1. I've try to lose weight, but always fail.

2. I don't feel in control of my eating.

3. I often eat when I'm not hungry.

4. I eat food when I'm stressed or upset.

5. I eat food for pleasure or as a reward.

6. I think about food a lot.

7. I can't stay on track when dieting.

8. I binge eat.

9. I feel ashamed of myself and my eating habits.

10. Food helps me deal with feelings.

Add up your TOTAL SCORE

Interpretation:

0