Beyond the Mood-Food Connection

It doesn’t take much convincing these days to underscore the importance of dealing with emotional eating if you are motivated to lose weight and to keep it lost. Freud recognized the connection over 100 years ago and thought it was an attempt to deal with unconscious needs. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that rigorous scientific research began to examine the role of emotions in eating disorders. By the mid-1990s there were hundreds of articles providing strong but complex relationships between emotions and overeating. Clearly, there are many circumstances where we eat or overeat when we don’t need the calories. But it isn’t as simple as eat-to-feel-better. Even 40 years ago, it was known that if you were dieting, or if you were normally weighted but were dissatisfied with your appearance or you were a frequent dieter (the so-called restrained eater) then you were more likely to react to stressful situations by overeating in contrast to normally weighted, non-dieting individuals. So, some of us respond to the mood-food connection much more strongly than others. Restrained eaters are the most vulnerable. Mood states such as anxiety, depression, anger, boredom, lack of sleep and loneliness can all be triggers for most of us to overeat, but especially so for restrained eaters and people actively dieting. Overeating to celebrate is also in the mix for some of us, but it doesn’t seem to be such a major mood-food link as these negative emotions.

Our Willpwr-ee (ee for emotional eating) app is designed specifically to help with emotionally-driven eating, but we haven’t stopped with simple mood-monitoring. We’ve used the research findings of Robert Thayer to drill down more deeply to track energy-tiredness and calmness-tension dimensions as well as more traditional mood states for our users, since these additional factors play a huge role in determining when and to what magnitude emotions trigger eating. And again, the relationship is … complex. Looked at from a slightly different perspective, certain combinations of tiredness and tension levels strongly affect willpower skills.

Here’s what appears to happen for most of us who have vulnerabilities for the mood-food connection. If we are well-rested and calm, it’s really pretty easy to resist a momentary temptation. That’s when we are in a state of “calm energy.” We aren’t tense and we have energy to face the events of the day. But if we are tense because of a particular situation, say, we are waiting to hear from a prospective employer about a job we really want, two things happen: At first, we aren’t thinking about food and probably don’t want to eat anything. Too upset. We might pace or feel agitated because the anxiety energizes us at first. We are in a state of “tense energy”. But as the hours go by and the phone doesn’t ring, we begin to feel more and more tired as well as more anxious. We’re now in a state Thayer calls “tense tiredness.” That’s a very uncomfortable condition, one that makes us more likely to flip into negative thinking and have negative emotions such as depressed mood, anger, etc. It is in this condition of tense tiredness that some of us are most vulnerable to reach for food and to overeat. Two systems have come into play. We try to restore energy through food and we try to restore better feelings through food.

You’ve probably never thought about tense tiredness or calm energy before, especially as they relate to eating, but once these states are pointed out, they makes a lot of sense. When you see how the interplay of tension and energy affects your own eating patterns, we think you’ll be far better prepared to deal with the mood-food connection. For now, let’s just say the name of the game is to find ways to have more calm energy and fewer tense tiredness periods. However, when you are in a tense tiredness state, which is really inescapable at times, you need awareness and skills to keep that condition from overwhelming your eating patterns. Don’t worry, we’ll help.