How I biohack emotional eating using science
Evidence based tools and practices that help me feel in control.
If you know me, you also know that I grew up training to become a professional ballerina. When I first got into ballet school at age nine, everyone there decided that I was too fat and ordered my mom to put me on a diet. The first diet I went on was the cabbage soup diet. I will never forget the summer of 1999, the smell of cabbage permeating our apartment for weeks on end while I did my “homework” - a thousand sit-ups every morning.
I did not become a professional ballerina and by some miracle, I did not develop an eating disorder. But those many years of restriction and being constantly judged (and deemed unworthy) by my physical appearance did leave a big mark and a fraught relationship with both food and my body. It took lots of therapy and work to untangle some of my patterns. Did I “heal” my relationship with food? Absolutely not. And if you stumble upon the many vlogs, posts and reels where health influencers tell you how they healed theirs, I’d urge you to look the other way.
So what’s the point of this post, then? While I don’t believe that we can definitively heal or cure any of our emotional or mental health problems, I do believe that we should take advantage of tools and practices that can ease the burden and help us control rather than being controlled by these afflictions.
First, it’s important to acknowledge that emotional eating is a spectrum. You can, like me, have episodes when if under emotional distress, your patterns and learned mechanisms of coping flare-up and you turn to food in order to soothe, but for the most part, have a balanced relationship with food. Or you could suffer from a full-blown eating disorder that affects your daily life and can lead to serious harm, both physical and mental. Various degrees of severity will require different approaches and if your condition is debilitating, I urge you to seek help immediately. No one deserves to live in pain, and you should receive all the help you need.
But second, know that there is nothing “wrong” with you. You can have all the knowledge, education and expertise in the world, and still struggle with emotional regulation. Even someone like Peter Attia talked about how during the process of writing Outlive, which was very stressful, he would would walk down to the pantry and get himself a bowl of mini-wheats, “inhale them”, and then do it again. He also talked about how he needs to restrict his environment in order to maintain a healthy relationship with food. In other words, he can’t have cookies in the house, or he’ll eat them all. I’m in the same camp, it’s much easier to not have chocolate around than to just have one square and then put the bar away. But I’ve long been fascinated with people who can, those who will have one bite of something and then just stop and go on about their day without the need to polish the entire thing off. I’ve asked a number of experts - psychologists, coaches to athletes and ex-military to explain this difference and every time, the answer was the same: just because those people don’t use food to soothe, that doesn’t mean they don’t engage in other compulsive behaviors. While for me it’s chocolate, for someone else it’s alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping, working out or even work.
I have been researching emotional eating for years and the only theory that made sense to me, in explaining these types of behaviors, is emotional dysregulation. I believe the key to disrupting compulsive patterns is addressing the root cause and learning the techniques necessary to modulate our response to strong emotions - both positive and negative. The most efficient framework I have discovered for that is Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). Incidentally, Peter Attia is also a fan of DBT and credits this type of therapy for helping him manage his anger issues.
If you’re not familiar with the term, DBT is a type of cognitive-behavioral therapy developed by Dr. Marsha M. Linehan in the late 1980s. It was initially designed to treat borderline personality disorder, but it has since been adapted and used for a variety of other mental health conditions, including depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, and substance use disorders. The core principle of DBT is the concept of dialectics, which involves synthesizing opposite viewpoints to find a balance between acceptance and change. Here's an example of dialectical thinking:
Imagine someone struggling with self-esteem issues who often feels they are not good enough, yet they also have moments where they recognize their own strengths and achievements.
This person might swing between extremes, such as thinking, "I'm completely worthless and have no redeeming qualities," in moments of low self-esteem, and then, during better moments, "I am fully competent and have no issues at all." These polarized views do not acknowledge the complexity of their self-worth and can lead to emotional instability.
Instead of oscillating between these extremes, dialectical thinking would involve recognizing and accepting both the feelings of inadequacy and the recognition of personal strengths. For example, "Even though I feel inadequate in some situations, I also acknowledge that I have specific strengths and achievements. Both these feelings are part of me, and I can work on building my self-esteem while accepting that I have areas to grow."
DBT is structured around four main components:
Mindfulness - the foundational skill in DBT, helping people accept and tolerate their emotions.
Distress Tolerance - techniques to tolerate pain in difficult situations, not change it. This involves learning to bear pain skillfully without reacting impulsively or avoiding it.
Emotion Regulation - strategies to manage and change intense emotions that are causing problems in a person's life. This includes understanding the function of emotions, reducing vulnerability to emotional reactions, and increasing positive emotional events.
Interpersonal Effectiveness - skills to navigate interpersonal relationships more effectively, such as asking for what one needs, saying no, and managing conflicts while maintaining respect for oneself and others.
To specifically address emotional eating using the DBT framework, I highly recommend Dr. Debra Safer’s book, The DBT Solution for Emotional Eating. Dr. Safer is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford and she is at the forefront of some of the most innovative research around eating disorders - including using neuromodulation, virtual reality and DBT interventions to improve outcomes. What makes her approach so fascinating is that all of the tools described in the book are intended to help people be their own “coaches” and empower them with the necessary skills even if they don’t have access to therapists or external support.
At the core of the DBT framework for emotional eating is understanding the factors that contribute to disordered eating in order to find ways to change those patterns and prevent them from recurring. The model suggests that we resort to emotional eating as a way to cope when our emotions become too overwhelming to control, withstand, or manage effectively—this is when we’re experiencing emotional dysregulation. It doesn't matter whether these emotions are considered "positive" (such as joy, enthusiasm, or longing) or "negative" (such as anger, sadness, or anxiety), or even a mix of both. Emotional eating has been adopted as a learned response aimed at diminishing our emotional discomfort. The good news is that because emotional eating is a behavior that has been learned, it's also possible to unlearn it.
If, from a biological point of view you are more emotionally vulnerable (it takes less to provoke an emotional reaction in you than in others) and if you are subjected to an environment where your feeling or reactions are invalidated, you can have an increased difficulty tolerating intense emotions which can lead to wanting to escape, numb, or avoid emotional distress. What makes emotional eating more complicated than other types of unhealthy behaviors is that food - unlike other substances - cannot be eliminated from our lives. Food also does its job incredibly well and it actually works (albeit only in the short term) to soothe and provide comfort. In the long term, however, emotional eating can increase distress, guilt, shame and disgust.
The book describes a specific set of skills in each chapter, followed by exercises to guide you through applying those skills in real life. There are twelve skills in total and I encourage you to read the whole book in order to fully grasp the key concepts and framework. I will, however, summarize the skills that I find most helpful and that I have implemented in my daily practice.
Writing down a Behavioral Chain Analysis - this is a great exercise to understand the sequence of events, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors leading up to a problematic behavior. It involves choosing an event, detailing the exact sequence of actions, identifying the prompting event that initiated the chain leading to the problem behavior, listing any factors that made me more vulnerable to engaging in the behavior, and identify the consequences and patterns. Here’s a link to how to do this exercise on your own.
Accessing my “Wise Mind” - this skill is rooted in mindfulness and it involves slowing down, pausing and observing. “Wise Mind is” essentially about integrating two modes of thinking: the "Emotional Mind" and the "Reasonable Mind." Emotional Mind is a state is driven by feelings, emotions, and personal experiences (it can feel “hot”), while Reasonable Mind is driven by logic, facts, and rational thinking (it can feel “cold”). Accessing the Wise Mind means acknowledging and valuing your emotions while also considering rational perspectives to guide effective action. Daily meditation is the most effective tool to practice Wise Mind, along with trying to pause whenever I feel emotionally agitated and to ask myself "What would my Wise Mind say?"
Breathwork - I’ve shared before that breathwork is one of the most effective ways for me to regulate my nervous system and to again, facilitate being present and finding those brief pauses that can make a huge difference between acting and reacting.
Practicing Dialectical Thinking - I like to use a particular visualization borrowed from sports psychology: an athlete in training is dedicated to the singular goal of winning gold. Believing that victory is the only acceptable outcome fuels the intense commitment and focus required to pursue their objective. If the athlete was content with lesser achievements, like settling for a bronze medal or merely appreciating the opportunity to compete with elite peers, it could dilute their competitive edge and undermine their performance. However, if the athlete doesn’t win, the most constructive approach is to embrace the disappointment, extract valuable lessons from the experience, and implement strategies to avoid future setbacks.
Being Effective - this skill means giving up being right, correct, perfect, and/or the view that things must be exactly as I want them to be. Instead, being effective means doing what I need to reach your goals.
Urge Surfing - by far the most useful skill in the moments I struggle, this involves using visualization to imagine my urge to numb as if it were a wave on the ocean and “surfing” this wave by staying with the experience of the urge without succumbing to it or intensifying it (by judging it).
For the most part, these strategies and tools are incredibly useful, but I still have moments when nothing helps and I succumb to eating all the chocolate in sight. The one rule I have for those instances is to not let them snowball. Perfectionism is a slippery slope and the first sign of a fixed mindset, so instead of throwing in the towel if things don’t according to plan, I try to move on and not linger too much over mistakes. A useful heuristic comes from Nat Zinsser:
Treating your mistakes as temporary protects you from the “here I go again” trap, and treating your mistakes as limited protects you from the “my whole day is going down the drain” trap. Treating your mistakes as nonrepresentative protects you from the “maybe I’m not good enough” trap, that swamp of unrestrained self-criticism that is always waiting to engulf us.
My hope is that you find these resources helpful and that if you are struggling, you will feel less alone knowing that so many us share the same struggle. If you are interested in learning more about managing emotional eating, the good news is that we are working on a mindful eating program at kahla that will be rooted in DBT and Dr. Safer’s framework. If you would like to join, please feel free to email me at sabina@kahla.com and I will add you to our list.