Emotional Eating
Our registered dietitian and nutritionist for emotional eating support provides various personalized nutritional and lifestyle interventions to help manage the behaviour.
What is emotional eating?
Before we outline how our dietitian and nutritionist for emotional eating can help, it’s important to identify what emotional eating actually is.
While it is difficult to clearly define emotional eating, some characteristics are worth mentioning to help differentiate this type of eating from physical hunger driven food consumption.
With emotional hunger:
- Eating serves the purpose to cope with challenging emotions, such as stress, anger, boredom, sadness or loneliness.
- Triggers may include relationship conflicts, work or other stress, fatigue, financial pressure, health problems rather than physical hunger.
- People often want to reward themselves or avoid having to face challenging emotions, situations or people.
- Tends to come on more suddenly and it has a sense of urgency to be satisfied.
- Specific food cravings need to be honoured, with clients often gravitating toward comfort foods.
- People do not feel satisfied with a full stomach, and often eat until uncomfortably full.
- Affected individuals often feel guilty, powerless and ashamed of their eating habits, often looking to reduce intake following an overeating episode in hopes of correcting the lapse.
- People often yo-yo diet, have rigid food rules and experience body image dissatisfaction.
How Can an Emotional Eating Dietitian and Nutritionist Help
A registered dietitian and nutritionist who specializes in emotional eating support can help in the following ways:
- Assess your current relationship with food and outline areas for improvement.
- Dispel various common myths and misconceptions around food.
- Demonstrate the difference between hunger and craving.
- Help learn to trust self with hunger and fullness cues, thereby consistently meeting nutritional requirements.
- Help implement various stress management techniques: meditation, breathing techniques, spending time in nature, listening to relaxing music, engaging in creative/expressive work et al.
- Assist you in mapping out personal triggers for emotional eating and proactively begin to overwrite coping with them through emotional eating – find substitute behaviours that help buffer stressors that are not food related
- Demonstrate how to use a hunger and fullness scale and rate meal satisfaction; aim for distraction-free meal consumption.
- Aim to implement consistent eating routines and maintain food adequacy, without skipping meals and undereating.
- Underscore the importance of keeping a food and mood journal to observe underlying patterns.
- Optimize sleep habits – often sleep deprivation drives food seeking behaviours with higher reward value (high sugar, fat and salt content options appear more rewarding when stressed and sleep-deprived).
- Pick the brain of an emotional eating dietitian and nutritionist during the counselling sessions.
- Provide ongoing support, as well as health and nutrition coaching.
Related Services
Contact us for a no-obligation phone consultation during which we can:
✓ outline how working with a nutritionist and dietitian looks like
✓ discuss your needs and goal(s)
✓ explain how billing and pricing work
✓ address concerns about insurance, if any
✓ answer any other questions
Dietitian & Nutritionist for Emotional Eating In-Person & Virtual
You can book an appointment with a dietitian and nutritionist for emotional eating support in-person or virtually at select office locations.
You can also work with a dietitian and nutritionist online.