More Than Hunger: Food, Emotion, and Chronic Illness
Our relationship with food can change throughout our life, particularly in chronic illness. We can find we have moved from comfort eating to emotional eating without realising.
We eat when we are celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas.
We eat when we are sad or unheard - a rough breakup, a bad day at work, a call or appointment that didn’t go to plan, when we are grieving,
We eat when we are with friends, brunch with the girls, dinner with the four-person WhatsApp group, a long overdue catch up.
We eat when we feel pain, chocolate to take away the period cramps, cheese to soothe the twisted ankle, crisps to mend the bruised ego.
We eat to show who we are and where we come from. To share our family recipes, our national dishes, recreate happy memories from trips and travels.
We are constantly encouraged to “treat ourselves” with food.
So where does emotional eating and “comfor food” divide? And how does chronic illness blur that line?
The definition of emotional eating is the “to eat in response to positive and negative emotions”. These emotions are often stress, boredom, loneliness, anger, sadness, fear, hurt. But it can also be feelings of happiness, contentment, and excitement.
The line where it becomes emotional eating can feel fuzzy, but it tends to come down to using food to cope with things often, or most of the time.
When food helps us to bypass, ignore, or cope with a feeling rather than meet a physical need, we can get stuck in a cycle. Eating food that our body doesn’t actually need, and at times, foods we don’t really want.
The emotional eating cycle has these steps:
You feel an emotion such as upset, boredom, or excitment.
You eat in reponse to the feeling.
Eating makes you feel better in the short term.
After a while, you may feel guilty or ashamed about your emotional eating.
These feelings may cause you to respond by eatting.
How this links to chronic illness and long-term health issues
In long-term health issues, emotional eating is very common. We feel the pain or symptom, we feel that we will never be free of our illness, and this brings feelings of grief, sadness, disappointment, lost of control, anger, stress, loss of choice. We reach for food to help us cope with these emotions. Then we may feel angry with ourselves for “ruining” our health plan. This adds to feelings of overwhelm, distress, and stress.
So what can we do?
Start by naming the gap between physical and emotional hunger.
Physical hunger builds gradually and can be satisfied by most foods. Emotional hunger tends to hit suddenly, often craves something specific, and isn’t relieved even when your stomach is full. Pausing to ask “am I actually hungry, or am I feeling something else?” is a small habit that interrupts the automatic reach for snacks and can be used mid snack. Not a judgement. Just a check in.
When the answer is “something else,” try to name the feeling itself. Stress, loneliness, excitment, boredom all call for different responses, and food can only ever blunt them temporarily.
A short walk, a text to a friend,a hug, ten minutes of doing absolutely nothing, or simply sitting with the discomfort can sometimes do more for the underlying emotion than the snack would.
Try on some compassion. Guilt and shame don't stop emotional eating, they fuel the next round of it. Treating a moment of comfort eating as a piece of data or a cue to take an action than something to feel guilty about ("I was stressed and reached for biscuits, what else could be possible here?") keeps the cycle from compounding.
Explore some urge surfing. Emotions, even intense ones, tend to follow a curve, like a wave. They build, peak, and pass, usually within twenty minutes or so. Riding the wave means noticing the urge, naming it, and staying with the discomfort without immediately acting on it, maybe setting a time of 1-5 minutes to see if you still feel the urge.
You're not white-knuckling your way through willpower.
You're simply giving the feeling room to crest and fall on its own timeline. Often the urge has softened by the timer goes off. Sometimes it hasn't, and that's fine too, now it's a choice rather than a reflex.
Our emotional reserves in chronic illeness
Chronic illness already asks a lot of your emotional reserves, and expecting perfect compliance with a nutrition or regime on top of that is unrealistic. Self-compassion isn’t indulgence, it’s what actually makes consistency possible over the long run.
If emotional eating feels constant, distressing, or tied up with a strained relationship with food more broadly, get in touch, I’d love to help you work wit this. This isn’t something you need to untangle alone.
