"I'm an emotional eater"

You may have a name for yourself. You're an emotional eater. You've done the online quiz, or a friend has said it, or you've said it about yourself with a small laugh at a dinner. It explains the visits, and it also makes them feel like part of who you are.

I'd like to look at that label, because the research on it is stranger than you'd think.

Psychologists have measured emotional eating for decades with questionnaires that ask things like whether you eat more when you're anxious or lonely. People who score high are called emotional eaters. The odd thing is what happens when you take those people into a laboratory, put them in a bad mood, and offer them food. Peggy Bongers and Anita Jansen reviewed those studies in 2016. Again and again, in the lab and in everyday settings, self-described emotional eaters didn't eat more when upset than anyone else. The questionnaires, they concluded, don't measure what they claim to. A high score may reflect concern about eating, a sense of eating being out of control, or a tendency to explain overeating by pointing to feelings, rather than a real link between mood and mouth.

A large pooling of experiments by Catharine Evers and colleagues in 2018 found the same. Across fifty-six studies, being put in a negative mood didn't increase eating in people who called themselves emotional eaters. It did increase eating in one group, which was people who were restraining their eating, meaning trying to eat less than they wanted to. I'll come back to that in chapter 12, because I think it's the most useful finding in this book.

What does this mean for you? Not that the visits aren't happening. They are, and you've got a week's notes to prove it. It means that "emotional eater" is a description you've adopted, and that the description does work of its own. If you believe that feelings make you eat, then a feeling arriving will seem to be an instruction, and the visit will seem to be what a person like you does. Bongers and colleagues found in another study that people who ate more after a bad mood also ate more after a good mood, and after simply being shown food. The eating wasn't tied to feeling bad. It was tied to cues in general, and feeling bad is one cue among several.

So I'd drop the label. Not because it's unkind, but because it's inaccurate, and inaccurate in a way that helps the habit. You're not a type of person. You're someone who has learned to answer a range of moments with food, and one of those moments is feeling bad. That's a habit, and it's a habit with a gap in it, which is the moment between the pull and the fridge. The rest of the book works in that gap.