Emotional Eating, Overeating, Binge Eating…What’s the difference?
This one comes up a lot in my work and I think there can be a lot of confusion between the three. As we go through these, if you notice relating to one or all three, be gentle with yourself. It’s natural to turn to food to cope with life.
If you think you fit any of these categories and it’s something you want to work on, please reach out. We’d love to help you heal your relationship with food and your body.
And/or refer you to a therapist in your area that specializes in eating disorders.
With that said, what is emotional eating?
Emotional eating is eating not for physical hunger but rather to fulfill emotional needs. A lot of times people use food to deal with uncomfortable feelings. If you find yourself reaching for ice cream when the house is quiet after a long and stressful day, you’d be engaging in emotional eating.
Other times people have shared they emotionally eat include:
Feeling lonely
Feeling sad, depressed, anxious, or bored
Emotional eating can occur when we are looking to feel something, or when we are looking to avoid feeling, or when we want to numb out.
Years ago, before my son Anthony was born, my husband Brian played pool on Wednesday nights. One pool night I didn’t want to cook so I ordered a stuffed crust pizza. I loved the idea of getting to order what I wanted and not having to compromise or share. The wonderful delivery person brought the hot pizza right to my door and I got to stay in my comfy pjs. Then I sat down and watched Project Runway while I ate.
I got into the habit of ordering a stuffed crust pizza every week on “Pool Widow Wednesday”. This pizza and my eating it fell into emotional eating because I was often feeling lonely in the house by myself. Eating the pizza while watching TV gave me something to do with my downtime when the house was quiet. It helped me fight boredom while also helping me relax midweek.
Each week I’d follow my ritual of ordering pizza, changing into comfy clothes, and watching Project Runway or whatever show I was currently binging on.
More often than not, I’d eat more pizza than I thought I should. Then the guilt would set in. I would hide the remaining one or two slices under other plastic containers in the fridge and stash the pizza box at the bottom of the recycle bin so Brian wouldn’t know I ordered pizza again and ate as much as I did.
I was so ashamed of myself and terrified Brian would catch onto what I was doing and say something about it.
I hear from so many people about the guilt they feel after an emotional eating episode. That guilt and shame are all too familiar to me, as well. Guilt and shame, while often felt after emotionally eating, aren’t always part of emotional eating.
We can engage in emotional eating without feeling bad about it.
Think about the last time you enjoyed a piece of cake for your birthday or your kids’ birthday. A few years ago my friend made an 8-hour homemade cheesecake for my birthday. I was so touched that she spent so much time making my favorite dessert, when I ate it I definitely felt love and joy. Both of which are emotions, and hence emotional eating.
Eating while we feel something pleasurable is also emotional eating, but it doesn’t produce the same feelings so we don’t usually think of it as emotional eating.
My hope is that you can start to look at emotional eating as something that we do all the time. In fact, the next episode talks more about emotional eating so stay tuned.
Let’s move on to overeating.
(I do not like to use this term and much prefer eating beyond our comfort level, but most people don’t speak that way…)
Overeating is simply consuming food past the point of comfort. There are likely emotions involved because we are feeling beings and always experiencing some emotion.
There are many reasons why we overeat. Here are just a few.
The food tastes REALLY good.
We aren’t paying attention to our fullness.
We’ve restricted food.
We aren’t paying attention to eating
We are trying to numb out or fill a void.
There are times I eat too much because the food tastes REALLY good. When we order Chinese from our favorite place, China King, I am more likely to eat past the point of comfortable fullness because it is so tasty!
One of the reasons I over-ate on “Pool Widow Wednesdays” was because I wasn’t paying attention to my fullness and if I was I wasn’t honoring that fullness. I remember thinking at times “I’m full now, but I really want to eat more.”
Have you ever had a big dinner planned and not eaten much throughout the day to “save” the calories for that event? Yeah, I’ve done that before. And it always leads to overeating at night.
Another reason I over-ate “Pool Widow Wednesdays”? I wasn’t being mindful of how I was eating. I was sitting in front of the TV with the pizza box on the coffee table. My attention wasn’t really on the pizza, it was on the TV and I mindlessly kept munching on slices until over half the pizza was gone.
I mentioned earlier that emotional eating can be used to numb out or fill a void. This can easily turn into overeating as we continue to try to meet that need with food and what we really need is something else. This is why I suggest choosing to emotionally eat, being mindful while doing so, and stopping once the need to cope has lessened or you notice eating isn’t helping you feel better.
So what’s the difference between overeating and binge eating? Or are they the same thing?
Overeating can be considered binge eating at times, but not all overeating results in a binge.
Binge eating can be classified by:
Eating large amounts of food when not physically hungry in a relatively short amount of time.
Binges often occur when you are alone because of the embarrassment and shame over how much was eaten. When we are with other people we are often more aware of how much we’ve consumed and can stop ourselves much easier because we fear the judgement of others.
The major difference between binge eating and overeating is the time frame in which the eating takes place. Eating over half the stuffed crust pizza over the course of a couple of hours would leave me feeling uncomfortably full and would be classified as overeating. Whereas eating the same amount of pizza in half an hour would be considered binge eating.
Binge eating may or may not be classified as binge eating disorder.
According to the DSM 5, the diagnostic guidelines for disorders, key features of binge eating disorder are:
Recurrent and persistent episodes of binge eating ( so 1 binge or a binge here and there won’t qualify as binge eating disorder)
Binge eating episodes are associated with three (or more) of the following:
Eating much more rapidly than normal
Eating until feeling uncomfortably full
Eating large amounts of food when not feeling physically hungry
Eating alone because of being embarrassed by how much one is eating
Feeling disgusted with oneself, depressed, or very guilty after overeating
Marked distress regarding binge eating
Absence of regular compensatory behaviors (such as purging).
Let’s recap:
All eating is emotional eating since we are always feeling something or trying to avoid feeling something.
All overeating is eating to a point of uncomfortableness. And overeating can be binge eating but isn’t always, depending on the amount of time the food is consumed over. A binge eating episode here and there does not constitute a binge eating disorder, however numerous episodes would.
Looking at the differences and similarities between emotional eating, binge eating, and binge eating disorder, we can see how much they overlap. My hope is that this clears up some of the major differences between them.
Remember, Overeating is something we all do from time to time and it doesn’t have the emotional or mental backlash that binge eating does.
If you’re reading this and relate to emotional eating and binge eating, you might be thinking “Oh no! I’m doomed to always feel and eat this way.”
I have good news for you!
Binge-eating episodes and emotional eating all start with our thoughts and emotions. Which as we’ll discuss in future blog posts, are shaped by our perspectives. The thoughts and feelings we have after engaging in these behaviors can perpetuate or shift our perspective.