Emotional Eating: Understanding the Connection and Finding Healthy Alternatives

Introduction Emotional eating is a very common activity which is done by individuals who eat the food for emotional reasons instead of hunger which is the actual reason. This behavior leads to eating more than necessary or making bad eating decisions since food lovers tend to crave junk food when in a bad mood. Some of the causes of emotional eating include stress, sadness, boredom, loneliness, and sometimes happiness. It should be noted that emotional eating is not the same as occasional self-control failure such as eating a slice of cake after a weight-loss diet. Emotional eating is a disorder, a form of hereditary response of the body to emotions, it is invariably harmful for the physical and the psychological health. Emotional eating is quite problematic and it is normally caused by psychological, social and environmental factors. For some individuals, this disorder is a form of emotional eating which is the reaction to a clinical diagnosis which has been acquired in childho...