Kinds of Emotions Associated With Eating

While researching how emotions affect eating habits, I was able to find a source that talked about certain kinds of feelings that may impact an individual’s diet more so than other feelings. The source I found was Diet and Your Emotions: The Comfort Food Falsehood by Joan Esherick. In chapter 2, she lists all kinds of emotions and its effects. The kinds of feelings she list are boredom, loneliness, anxiety/stress, fear, helplessness, sadness, bitterness/resentment, depression, and lastly frustration. These were the main emotions that caused a person to have emotional eating while she was researching this topic. Some examples to back up these emotions are as followed. For boredom it is because “It feels good and will help pass the time” (35). For loneliness it’s to fill the void in an individual’s life. By over eating it causes a person to feel as though they are treating themselves and making themselves feel special. For stress and anxiety it is to help calm a person’s nerves. The last example I’m going to talk about is for depression. When a person is depressed, food causes them to “feel better” when their lives are other wise full of disappointment. This was just some evidence to back up a few of the main emotions that Joan Esherick talks about in a chapter of her book.
I thought this chapter was very interesting. I had no idea that certain emotions were found to effect eating habits more so than other emotions. I was very curious to see how each emotion had a different reaction to food, like with boredom it was a pass time, but with stress and anxiety it was to calm someone’s nerves. I really enjoyed learning about this topic and I hope to learn even more about this in the future.

Esherick, Joan. Diet and Your Emotions: The Comfort Food Falsehood. Pennsylvania: Mason Crest Publishers Inc., 2006. 27-41. Print.