What is a Stress Eating Disorder?

Know Symptoms and Treatment Options for Emotional Eating Disorders

Emotional eating, a term often used interchangeably with stress eating, involves using food to cope with negative emotions or feelings of overwhelm.

Many people have a fraught relationship with food and their body. Similarly, stress can affect overall well-being severely, leaving you vulnerable to new or worsened mental and physical health concerns.

Quality treatment is critical for anyone with a stress eating disorder. It’s also crucial to seek professional support if you experience high stress levels, especially if it’s ongoing.

That’s where Catalina Behavioral Health comes in. You can get to a place where stress eating, emotional eating, or binge eating no longer rule your life. Our team is here to help.

What is a Stress Eating Disorder?

A “stress eating disorder” is not a formal diagnosis. However, stress eating or emotional eating is common in people with eating disorders. For example, bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder.

Not everyone who resonates with the phrases stress eating or emotional eating will have a diagnosable eating disorder.

This does not mean that seeking mental health support is not valuable; quite the opposite. Seeking help for prolonged distress matters because it can help you avoid new or worsened physical and mental health consequences of stress. It can also help you address stress-related eating.

The Connection Between Stress and Eating Disorders

Overeating can be a response to stress. Whether or not you have a diagnosable eating disorder, looking at the connection between stress and eating disorders can help you understand some of the ways eating habits and stress might intersect.

How Eating Disorders and Stress Eating Create Cycles

Both eating disorders and stress eating can create cycles that actually increase your stress in the long term. When people stress eat, it can create feelings of guilt or shame. In turn, a person may emotionally eat more to cope with said difficult feelings, which may become a cycle. You feel guilty or ashamed, so you stress eat more.

Similarly, people with eating disorders often experience a great deal of distress. This distress may relate to things like constantly thinking about how to prevent weight gain, concerns about the appearance of one’s body, and anxiety related to future binges or emotional eating episodes.

Stressful Situations and Eating Disorder Risk

Traumatic and stressful events can increase your risk of eating disorders. Additionally, times of high stress can lead to intensified problematic eating habits or behaviors.

Any form of life stress can take a toll on the body and mind, so having healthy ways to relieve stress is crucial. When you only have–or mostly have–food as a way to cope, you may rely on it.

Understanding the Importance of Treatment for Stress Eating

If something affects your emotional or psychological health negatively, you deserve to get help for it. Period.

Here’s why treatment matters for anyone facing disordered eating, stress eating, eating disorders, or high stress levels.

Identifying the Role of Disordered Eating Habits

Although they are not something you want to continue, disordered eating behaviors serve a purpose. Identifying the purpose of disordered eating–for example, overeating to reduce stress–means that you can find healthy ways to meet that need.

Coping Strategies for Managing Stress

Stress increases your risk not just of eating disorders, but also, high blood pressure, insomnia, and other health issues. We all need skills to help us manage stress.

Examples of coping strategies for stress management include:

• Physical activity. Walking, running, lifting weights, dancing, yoga, tai chi, or even less-structured forms of body movement–like intense exercise in TIPP skills–can aid stress management.
• Social support. Talking with a friend, partner, or family member.
• Self-talk. The ability to talk yourself through situations, especially through positive self-talk, can be an imperative life and coping skill.
• Creative activities. For example, journaling or crafts.

Grounding exercises, breathing exercises, and white noise can also help you unwind. What works for one person could differ from that of another, and having multiple coping skills in your toolkit is ideal.

Working Toward Specific Goals to Overcome Emotional Eating

People who have eating disorders, or who stress eat, will often have specific goals to work toward in therapy. These may include:

• Identifying how you feel. Being able to pinpoint what you are feeling (e.g., “angry”) and accepting that that is how you feel can be one of the first steps toward working through difficult emotions.
• Improving communication. Broadly, learning how to express yourself better matters. This could include conflict resolution, speaking up for yourself at work, the ability to share how you feel, or something else.
• Boundary setting. Setting any type of boundaries in your life. For example, time boundaries, physical boundaries, or emotional boundaries.

All clients in our programs set and work toward goals with the help of our providers.

Addressing the Underlying Causes of Stressful Food Consumption

If you face disordered eating or have an eating disorder, it’s possible that there are underlying causes to address.

For example, eating disorders often co-occur with anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and mood disorders. Treatment can help you address these underlying causes.

Creating a Healthy Mindset

At Catalina Behavioral Health, we strive to help clients create a sustainable and healthy relationship with food and their body. Part of that can include a healthy mindset around nutrition itself.

For example:

• Mindful eating. Increased mindfulness allows you to stay in touch with your body.  Treatment providers may work with you on goals like identifying your level of physical hunger using the hunger scale.
• Eating regular meals and snacks. Going for extended periods without eating can cause a drop in blood sugar and may contribute to binge eating. Having a schedule is not the opposite of intuitive or mindful eating; it can support it.
• Creating balance. Sometimes, people who eat to relieve stress will attempt to avoid certain foods altogether, which may make food cravings worse. It can lead to an all-or-nothing mindset (e.g., “I already messed up, so I will eat the whole thing.”) Creating balance, which might look different from person to person, is ideal.

We help all clients create positive daily life routines. This can help you establish and sustain good habits.

Call Catalina Behavioral Health for Help With Stress-Related Disordered Eating Behaviors

Catalina Behavioral Health is a leading mental health and addiction treatment center. Located in Tucson, Arizona, we provide specialized care for behavioral health concerns. This includes life stress and eating disorders.

Feeling stressed on a persistent basis and having trouble with food are signs that it is time to seek help. Call Catalina Behavioral Health confidentially today for more information about our programs.

FAQs About Stress Eating Disorders

Why does stress make you want to eat?

Physical and psychological factors can contribute to stress eating. High cortisol levels can increase hunger, which may be why stress causes people to overeat.

What is binge eating disorder (BED)?

BED is an eating disorder diagnosed using criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from the American Psychological Association.

It is characterized by symptoms such as eating rapidly, eating large amounts when not hungry, eating until uncomfortably full, eating alone due to feelings of embarrassment, and feeling guilty, disgusted, or down afterward.

References

1. https://dialecticalbehaviortherapy.com/distress-tolerance/tipp/
2. https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/eating-disorders/what-are-eating-disorders
3. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/why-stress-causes-people-to-overeat
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK338301/table/introduction.t1/