Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson and in this week's vlog, I want to talk about the difference between emotional eating and addictive eating. Are they the same thing? Can you do both at the same time? Is there a difference? How do they work in the brain? That's what we're going to cover in this week's vlog.
They're different and there's overlap. Let me break it down for you. I want you to picture a Venn diagram. That's the big circles, right? You've got emotional eating here, that's a big circle, and addictive eating, and there is significant overlap. I would say that in the people who are most likely tuning into my videos, there's massive overlap, meaning that there are instances of emotional eating that really don't qualify as addictive eating. I'll explain those to you. There are instances of addictive eating that are not emotional eating. I'll explain those to you and give you some examples. For people like me and you, probably the majority of times that we're eating in a way that feels that way where we're eating, not just sitting down to a beautiful weighed and measured Bright meal would be instances of both emotional eating and addictive eating.
Let me break it down. Emotional eating is, I'm going to be so lame, it's eating over your emotions. You have some sort of emotional activation that's probably not positive, but it could be positive. It could be excitement, joy, celebration, anticipation. It could be boredom, stress, anger, frustration. And it drives you to the food or it feels like it drives you to the food and you find yourself eating. That's emotional eating. Does that ever happen in a situation that's not addictive? Well, let's define addictive eating.
Addictive eating is driven by obsession and compulsion. It's craving. It's driven by a biological need in the mesolimbic reward pathway, dopamine downregulation causing the need for a hit. It comes with drive. It comes with craving. It comes with propulsive force to go get it. Now, this doesn't actually have to have a lot of emotional charge, believe it or not. Usually it comes with emotional charge, but it doesn't have to have that. Let me now describe examples of eating that I've engaged in myself that are emotional but not addictive or addictive, but not emotional.
I now have been weighing and measuring my food, eating no sugar and flour for the better part of 23 years. That's my baseline. I wrote down my food the night before and then ate only and exactly that for the first five years. Ever since then, I seem to go through stretches where I write down my food the night before. That's the majority of the time. Sometimes I'll go through little periods of time where I'm not writing down my food the night before and it tends to work for me until it doesn't. Usually what'll happen is life will get a little bit more full on, like busier, maybe a little bit more stressed and I'll find that I need to write down my food again just to feel more grounded and so forth. So, I'm thinking it was a couple years ago, and I was in a little stretch of time where I wasn't writing down my food the night before. These days I totally am. And that means it was dinner time and I got to decide what I was going to eat. Now, I mean within the framework of four ounces of Bright Line approved protein, six ounces of Bright Line approved cooked vegetable, a Bright Line weighed out salad with oil and vinegar, and I usually put nutritional yeast on my salad and that was going to be dinner. So, I'm thinking, what protein, what vegetable am I going to have? And I was emotionally activated. What I mean by that is I'd had a day. I'm kind of, I don't want to say storming into the kitchen, but I'm like, I need me a little something and I decide to have baby pork sausages the kind you get at a diner for breakfast for my protein and frozen kernels of corn for my cooked vegetable and a weight out salad. I know that I'm doing it emotionally. At this moment, I don't have any food addiction in play in the sense that my dopamine receptors are healed. I don't experience cravings. This was not an addictive thing. This was an emotional thing. I was choosing comfort food and I checked myself and I knew that like it wasn't going to lead to anything like I was going to wake up in the morning and weigh out oats and blueberries and yogurt for breakfast and tootle along my way, but I made a conscious choice to eat emotionally. You feel it? Not addictive eating, emotional eating. Some people might be feeling lonely on a winter day and decide to have soup to comfort themselves, emotional eating. Someone might decide to eat goulash like their grandpa made on the anniversary of his death. Emotional eating, right? Not addictive eating, emotional eating.
Other side of the extreme, addictive eating that's not emotional eating. I got to rewind all the way back to 2012. This was when Maya had just been born. She was about nine months old and I decided to embark on an intuitive eating experiment. I wanted to become a competent eater so that I could, God bless me, I can't even say it with a straight face, so that I could eat all the foods that my three daughters were eating and eat in moderation with them. I really thought I would be successful. At this point in my life I had, let me do the math, nine years of success with no sugar, no flour, weighing and measuring my food. I thought I really might be cured. I really thought I might be cured. I hired a world renowned intuitive eating coach, and I got a lot of support around me, talked to a lot of friends in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction who were not food addicts and they're like, "I bet you can do it. " And I embarked on this experiment. So, I started eating sugar and flour and I'm coached by my coach to just breathe. I can't even eat the foods mindfully and eat until I've had enough. I think you know where this is going. My brain doesn't really have enough sugar cookies when I start to eat sugar cookies. There is no enough point. Now, at this point I had worked the 12 steps, I'm going to make up a number, 10 times, in several different 12-step programs. I'd done a ton of therapy. I was super happy in my life. I was not eating emotionally at all. I would sit down to do the experiment as my coach was guiding me and the addiction of that substance would hit my brain and I kept breathing and checking in and it was not satisfied. I had not had enough. I was not binging because I was not eating quickly, but I was eating and eating and eating and eating and eating and eating that sugar and flour to the point where I was like, "Okay, this is a little unmanageable." It took me about a month to realize that that experiment did not work. Then I tried everything else under the sun and nothing else worked either and I just came right back to no sugar, no flour, weighed and measured meals. The whole experiment took two or three months. But in that moment, can you feel that I was not eating emotionally? There was no emotion there. It was cold and calculated. I was trying to do my homework and I could not find a stopping place. I could not feel satisfied. My brain wanted more. I was eating addictively. It was a biological imperative that we're not satisfied. Thank you. More please, more please, more please, more please.
Now, in most of the circumstances that feel hugely problematic, we're doing both. We're triggered by an emotion, we're stressed out or we're feeling all the feels of an emotional swirl of a social event or something and our brains aren't fully healed and the drive for more is there and we're eating both emotionally and addictively. We're about to cover this in pretty significant depth in Bright Line EatingĀ® because what we've found is that our people often if they can't stay Bright, it's an issue of emotional eating like the combination of the emotion with the addiction. If you haven't really learned how to self-regulate your emotions, it becomes a vortex that you just can't escape from the combination of emotional eating and addictive eating. What I'm going to be doing is I'm hosting a webinar. It's this Saturday. It's called, "The Hijacked Brain: the Neuroscience of Emotional Eating." And I want to take you deeper on this topic of the combination between emotional eating and addictive eating.
But for this vlog, I just wanted to elucidate the difference to you because I think it's helpful to understand they are different things, but for most of us they overlap hugely. Go ahead and click below if you want to register for that webinar. I would love to see you there and it's free and we'll go deeper on the neuroscience together and that's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
