Emotional eating: when food answers a feeling instead of hunger

It is evening after a long day. You are not hungry, but you open the fridge anyway, and ten minutes later you are not quite sure what you ate. Most people know this moment. What matters is how often it happens, and whether food has become your main way of handling difficult feelings.

Eating for reasons other than hunger

Psychologists call this emotional eating: eating in response to emotions, usually unpleasant ones, rather than to physical hunger. In 1986 Tatjana van Strien and colleagues published the Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire, which separates three patterns: emotional eating, external eating (eating because food is in sight or smells good) and restrained eating. It is still one of the most used questionnaires on the topic.

Our Emotional Eating Test builds on that idea of emotional eating, but we wrote the 10 statements ourselves, so it is a self-reflection tool, not the Dutch questionnaire or any other validated measure. For each statement you choose how often it is true for you: never, rarely, sometimes, often or nearly always. All ten add up to one score.

What the statements cover

Some statements ask about triggers, such as "I reach for food when I feel stressed, even though I am not hungry" and "I eat when I am bored". Others ask how the eating itself feels, for example eating quickly and almost automatically, or finding it hard to stop. A third group asks about what comes afterwards, such as "I feel ashamed of how much I have eaten".

So a high score can come from frequent emotional eating, from strong guilt and shame about it, or from both. Look at which statements you rated highest before you draw conclusions from the total.

Stress does not affect everyone the same way

Stress makes some people eat more and others eat less. In 2000 Georgina Oliver, Jane Wardle and Leigh Gibson ran a laboratory study in which some participants were stressed by having to prepare a speech, then offered a meal. Among people who scored high on emotional eating, stress led to eating more sweet, high-fat food. The same stress did not have that effect on people who scored low.

Eating to soothe a feeling now and then is an ordinary part of life. Food is comforting, and a piece of cake after a hard week does not need fixing. It becomes a concern when eating is your main or only way to calm down, or when the guilt that follows adds a second bad feeling to the first one.

Small steps that do not involve rules about food

When you notice the urge to eat outside a meal, pause for a moment and name what you feel: tired, bored, lonely, angry or hungry. Sometimes food is still the answer, and that is fine. Sometimes another answer fits the feeling better, such as rest, a short walk or a message to someone you like. If you do eat for comfort, try to notice the taste instead of eating on autopilot, and skip the self-criticism afterwards, which only adds another bad feeling to the one you started with.

Not a diagnosis

This test does not diagnose anything, including eating disorders. Talk to a doctor or psychologist if you often eat large amounts of food while feeling unable to stop, if you eat in secret, if you try to make up for eating by vomiting, fasting or exercising hard, or if thoughts about food and your body take up much of your day. The same applies if emotional eating comes together with weeks of low mood or strong anxiety.

If stress is your most common trigger, the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) and the emotional regulation test look at it from other angles. If guilt is the hardest part, read about the three parts of self-compassion.