9.1.5) Emotional Eating
Your ability to eat normally during stressful or emotional situations
Food cravings can hit when you’re emotionally weak. You may turn to food for comfort — consciously or unconsciously — when facing a difficult problem, feeling stressed or even feeling bored. This can lead to overeating, especially of high-calorie, sweet and fatty foods. Emotional eating is using eating as a way to suppress or soothe negative emotions, such as stress, anger, fear, boredom, sadness and loneliness.
Genetic and environmental factors can have an impact on our eating behavior. These genetic neuronal influences link to impulsive behavior, emotional response and preferences for high-calorie food. Eating behavior or emotional eating involves a complex interplay of physiologic, psychological, social, and genetic factors that influence meal timing, quantity of food intake, food preference and ability to eat normally during emotional or stressful times.
Variations that have an impact on the desire to eat have been linked to increased body mass index (BMI). By understanding why, we eat and the motivational factors driving food choices, we can take proactive steps to avoid health issues including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
If you have a variation in this panel, you may want to consider the following to improve your health:
- Pack healthy snacks, such as fruit and nuts to avoid temptation – they tend to contain more fiber and water, so you fill up on fewer calories.
- Don’t keep hard-to-resist comfort foods in your home.
- Avoid shopping for groceries while you are hungry and don’t buy processed foods, refined sugar and flour.
- Keep a food diary to identify the emotional or impulse source of your eating.
- Substitute a healthier behavior such as taking a walk, playing with your pet, or calling a friend.
- Consider consulting a healthcare professional.
An example of a gene that has been associated with ability to eat normally during stressful or emotional situations is:
FTO: Encodes the fat mass and obesity-associated protein. Affects the hypothalamus region of the brain which regulates appetite, energy intake and satiety.