Mikkipedia

Episode Summary
This is a solo Mini Mikkipedia on emotional eating, prompted by a practitioner who asked Mikki how to help a client who describes herself as a lifelong emotional eater — someone who eats when she is stressed, eats when the day has been long and she finally sits down, and has tried everything she has read about without anything sticking. Rather than going straight to coping strategies, Mikki starts by asking whether it is emotional eating at all.
The answer she gives is careful. Emotional eating is measured by questionnaires like the Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire and the Emotional Eating Scale, but when high scorers are put in a lab under a genuinely induced negative mood, they largely do not eat more than anyone else — and the group that reliably does eat more is restrained eaters, meaning dieters. That does not make emotional eating imaginary: it shows up consistently in clinical binge eating, and phone-based sampling in ordinary life does show boredom, stress and low mood preceding craving. Mikki's position is that someone calling themselves an emotional eater is describing something real but may have the mechanism wrong. A large share of it, she argues, is under-fuelling, chaotic eating and under-sleeping with an emotional trigger sitting on top — so the mechanical causes come first, and only what survives that audit is worth treating as an emotional problem. The second half is practical: regular eating structure, tracking the trigger rather than the food, one if-then plan, affect labelling, and letting a self-limiting urge pass. Useful if you work with clients who use this label about themselves, or you use it about yourself.
Key Topics
  • Why the emotional eating questionnaires may not measure what they claim — high scorers largely do not eat more than anyone else when negative mood is genuinely induced in a lab, and across a meta-analysis of 56 experimental studies in nearly 3,700 participants the group who reliably ate more were dieters, not self-identified emotional eaters
  • Where emotional eating does hold up: clinical binge eating, and real-life phone sampling showing boredom, stress and low mood preceding craving
  • Restraint as a driver — attempted restriction predicting the next loss-of-control episode better than actual restriction did, and why the attempt matters more than the achieved deficit
  • The mechanical audit to run first: enough food earlier in the day, protein at each meal, satiety signals like volume, speed, texture and flavour, long gaps without eating, and sleep
  • How sleep restriction raises ghrelin, lowers leptin and shifts brain activity away from the frontal and insular regions towards the amygdala — and why someone on six hours of sleep presents identically to an emotional eater but needs a different intervention
  • The two patterns worth distinguishing: clock-locked eating that goes sideways between five and ten at night regardless of the day, and situation-locked eating that tracks events instead
  • Why a regular eating structure removes the physiological amplifier and makes the emotional signal visible
  • Tracking the trigger rather than the food for two weeks, why most people find their triggers far narrower than they assumed, and why an if-then plan works better when it adds a behaviour than when it removes one
  • Affect labelling, and urges being self-limiting — rising, peaking and falling within about 10 to 20 minutes whether or not you act on them
  • Self-criticism after an episode reliably predicting more eating, and self-compassion tested as the alternative
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and the emotional eating label
04:00 Ruling out under-fuelling and sleep
06:59 Clock-locked versus situation-locked eating
09:52 Building a regular eating structure
11:55 Tracking the trigger and if-then plans
14:09 Affect labelling and riding out the urge
16:27 Self-compassion and when to refer on
18:33 Recap and close

Questionnaires discussed
  • Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire (DEBQ) — van Strien, T., Frijters, J. E. R., Bergers, G. P. A., & Defares, P. B. (1986). The Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ) for assessment of restrained, emotional, and external eating behavior. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 5(2), 295–315.
  • Emotional Eating Scale (EES) — Arnow, B., Kenardy, J., & Agras, W. S. (1995). The Emotional Eating Scale: the development of a measure to assess coping with negative affect by eating. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 18(1), 79–90.
Studies and research discussed
Referenced in the order they come up in the episode. Mikki describes each by its finding rather than by citation, so these have been identified afterwards and matched on population, design and reported numbers.
  • Whether the emotional eating scales measure what they claim (01:36, 02:19) — Bongers, P., & Jansen, A. (2016). Emotional eating is not what you think it is and emotional eating scales do not measure what you think they measure. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1932. Concludes the scales lack predictive and discriminative validity, and may instead capture how people think about the relationship between mood and eating rather than what they actually eat.
  • The meta-analysis of 56 experimental studies (02:35, 03:12) — Evers, C., Dingemans, A., Junghans, A. F., & Boevé, A. (2018). Feeling bad or feeling good, does emotion affect your consumption of food? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 92, 195–208. Fifty-six experimental studies, 3,670 participants. Negative emotion increased eating in restrained eaters; it did not increase eating in people with overweight or obesity, in people with eating disorders, or in self-assessed emotional eaters.
  • Attempted restraint versus actual restriction (04:20) — Manasse, S. M., et al. (2023). Differentiating types of dietary restraint and their momentary relations with loss-of-control eating. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 56(4). Ecological momentary assessment over 7–14 days in 96 adults with binge-spectrum eating disorders.
  • Brain imaging after sleep deprivation (05:38) — Greer, S. M., Goldstein, A. N., & Walker, M. P. (2013). The impact of sleep deprivation on food desire in the human brain. Nature Communications, 4, 2259. Reduced activity in frontal and insular evaluation regions alongside amplified amygdala activity, with increased desire for high-calorie food tracking the subjective severity of sleep loss.
  • The single night of sleep curtailment (06:06) — Yang, C.-L., Schnepp, J., & Tucker, R. M. (2019). Increased hunger, food cravings, food reward, and portion size selection after sleep curtailment in women without obesity. Nutrients, 11(3), 663. Habitual seven-to-nine-hour sleepers, time in bed cut by a third for one night; more hunger and cravings, more chocolate consumed on a progressive ratio task, and larger self-selected lunch portions.
  • Affect and craving in daily life (08:34) — Aulbach, M. B., Bamberg, C., Reichenberger, J., Arend, A.-K., & Blechert, J. (2025). Bidirectional associations between affect and food craving within and between individuals: A mega-analysis. Appetite, 209, 107936. Eight pooled ecological momentary assessment studies, 764 participants, four to six daily questionnaires over 7–20 days. Negative momentary states were associated with more craving at the same moment; the mega-analysis did not find a significant prospective link from current affect to craving at the following assessment.
  • Affect labelling (14:09) — Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.
  • Why negatively framed if-then plans backfire (13:12) — Adriaanse, M. A., et al. (2011). Planning what not to eat: ironic effects of implementation intentions negating unhealthy habits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(1), 69–81. Plans framed as "if X, then not Y" produced ironic rebound effects, most strongly where the habit was strongest.
  • Why one plan beats several (13:41) — Verhoeven, A. A. C., Adriaanse, M. A., de Ridder, D. T. D., de Vet, E., & Fennis, B. M. (2013). Less is more: the effect of multiple implementation intentions targeting unhealthy snacking habits. European Journal of Social Psychology, 43(5), 344–354. A single plan changed snacking behaviour; multiple plans did not.
  • Self-compassion after a diet-breaking preload (16:27) — Adams, C. E., & Leary, M. R. (2007). Promoting self-compassionate attitudes toward eating among restrictive and guilty eaters. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 26(10), 1120–1144. A brief self-compassion induction reduced distress and attenuated subsequent eating among highly restrictive eaters.
  • Self-compassion in clinical eating disorders (16:59) — Serpell, L., et al. (2020). The role of self-compassion and self-criticism in binge eating behaviour. Appetite, 144, 104470. Women with bulimia nervosa or binge eating disorder symptoms randomised to self-compassion or self-critical rumination after a negative mood induction; the self-compassion group consumed significantly fewer calories, rated the food as less pleasurable and reported less desire to continue eating.

A note on scope
Mikki is explicit that eating past physical discomfort, eating secretly, or significant distress afterwards warrant proper screening and referral to a psychologist with eating disorder experience (17:43). The episode is general information, not individual clinical advice.



Contact Mikki:
https://mikkiwilliden.com/
https://www.facebook.com/mikkiwillidennutrition
https://www.instagram.com/mikkiwilliden/
https://linktr.ee/mikkiwilliden
NZ listeners - save 10% off Calocurb by using the code Mikkipedia10 at www.calocurb.co.nz
Save 20% on all Nuzest Products WORLDWIDE with the code MIKKI at www.nuzest.co.nz, www.nuzest.com.au or www.nuzest.com
Curranz supplement: MIKKI saves you 25% at www.curranz.co.nz or www.curranz.co.uk off your first order

Creators and Guests

Host
Mikki Williden

What is Mikkipedia?

Mikkipedia is an exploration in all things health, well being, fitness, food and nutrition. I sit down with scientists, doctors, professors, practitioners and people who have a wealth of experience and have a conversation that takes a deep dive into their area of expertise. I love translating science into a language that people understand, so while some of the conversations will be pretty in-depth, you will come away with some practical tips that can be instigated into your everyday life. I hope you enjoy the show!

Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Minimikipedia on a Monday. And I want to chat about emotional eating and what actually helps. And I know that I've done several podcasts in the realm of this, and I just think it is such a good reminder for people who struggle in this area. And in fact, a practitioner had asked me recently how she should help a client who describes herself as an emotional eater, that it's a lifelong pattern.

She eats when she eats when she's stressed, she eats when the day has been long and she finally sits down. And she's tried everything she's read about and nothing has stuck. And it's a good question, right? And I want to ask it, and I want to think about the topic, not just from like the, that aren't food when it comes to emotional eating, but also I think it's worth asking whether it is even emotional eating to begin with.

And so let's just start there. Emotional eating has a pretty straightforward definition. You eat more in response to a particular emotion. It's not always negative. Some people eat when they're really happy or more than just celebratory eating, but when they feel pleasure or joy, they will eat.

And emotional eating is measured with questionnaires, which is how we have some literature on it. And the most commonly used ones are the Dutch eating behavior questionnaire and the emotional eating scale.

And millions of people have filled these in, and it's determined the type of emotional eater that they might be.

The thing is though, is that when researchers take people who score high on these questionnaires and put them in a lab, they induce a genuinely negative mood, because that's often what the scales are measuring, eating in response to a negative mood.

And then they measure how much the person actually eats. The self-identified emotional eaters largely don't eat more than anyone else.

And this has been tested repeatedly, including in studies designed specifically to answer the criticism that earlier attempts used weak mood inductions and boring food, i.e. didn't really induce a negative mood.

And who would eat the food that they put because it was bland and just not that tasty.

However, the result holds. Bongers and Janssen were two such researchers who reviewed the whole literature, and they concluded that emotional eating scales do lack the predictive and discriminative validity.

They just don't measure what they claim to measure.

And there is another study I just want to mention, which is a meta-analysis that pulled 56 experimental studies on nearly 3,700 participants, and they all were testing whether emotions causally affect eating.

And negative emotion increased eating in restrained eaters.

So it did not increase eating in people who described themselves as emotional eaters.

It did not increase eating in people with overweight or obesity.

And it did not increase people eating in people with eating disorders in that pulled analysis of all of the literature.

So the group who reliably ate more under a negative emotion state were people who dieted.

They weren't the self-identified emotional eaters.

And then look, this doesn't mean emotional eating isn't real.

In people with clinical binge eating, it shows up consistently.

And when researchers stop using questionnaires and instead ping people on their phones several times a day,

boredom, stress, and low mood do reliably precede food craving in ordinary life.

And look, if you're a usual person who identifies as having some emotional eating behavior, that is not going to be news to you.

I just think that the label that people have been handed is a bit of a poor description of it.

So, when someone says to you that they're an emotional eater, they are telling you something real about the experience,

but they might be wrong about the mechanism.

And here's a place to sort of start.

So a large proportion of what gets labeled emotional eating is actually just under-fueling with an emotional trigger sitting on top of it.

So restraint, meaning the attempt to restrict food, is one of the more robust predictors of a loss of control eating in the literature.

There is a nice piece of work in adults with binge spectrum eating disorders where researchers surveyed people repeatedly through the day for a fortnight

and found that attempted restraint predicted the next loss of control episode better than actual restriction did.

So it was the trying to avoid the enjoyable foods and trying to limit the amount more than the actual achieved calorie reduction

that predicted what happened next.

So the first questions should be mechanical.

So if someone says that they're emotional eating, a really good audit to run is, are they eating enough earlier in the day?

Is protein present at each meal?

Are they eating in a way that helps satisfy their hunger and not leading to cravings later on that move beyond protein?

Things like volume of food, things like speed of eating, the texture of the food, the flavors that they're eating,

like all of these things signify satiety, are these being met?

And is the individual going long stretches without eating?

Is she sleeping?

And I probably don't need to tell you at this point that sleep restriction reliably increases cravings.

So it raises ghrelin, which is our hunger hormone.

It lowers leptin, which is our satiety hormone.

And it increases hunger and appetite.

With the biggest jump in appetite for calorie-dense foods, the brain imaging work adds to that mechanism.

So after sleep deprivation, activity drops in the frontal and insular regions that evaluate food,

while the amygdala activity goes up.

So this results on people wanting higher calorie food,

and how much they want tracks reliably with how badly people sleep, or they feel they slept.

And there was a study, actually, where they used habitual seven to nine-hour sleepers,

and they cut the time in bed by a third, just for a single night.

And after that one night, there was more hunger, more cravings,

and more chocolate eating on a food reward task,

and larger self-selection portions at lunch.

And that was just a night.

Someone running on six hours of sleep and coffee until two in the afternoon

will present exactly like an emotional eater.

Every symptom will match, but the intervention needs to be completely different.

So first up, when it comes to emotional eating, rule out that mechanical stuff first.

If the pattern persists while an individual is genuinely well-fed and well-sweeped,

then it's effect-driven, meaning actually there is something going on beyond that stuff

that needs to be addressed.

Now, there are a couple of different patterns with emotional eating that I think are worth mentioning.

And the first one is locked to the clock.

So you are fine all day, and then it just goes sideways somewhere between five and ten at night,

regardless of what kind of day it was.

Whereas the second pattern is something is tied to a situation instead.

A difficult call, a conflict, a piece of news,

and it happens at 11 in the morning on a Tuesday just as readily as it would nine at night.

So the time-locked version is usually arithmetic, right?

So if breakfast was a coffee and lunch was plain chicken salad or whatever was left in the fridge,

there's a deficit by mid-afternoon, and it has to go somewhere.

It goes somewhere in the evening.

And so cue exposure compounds it.

So the kitchen is right there.

Work has stopped.

We're able to just relax a little bit,

so we're no longer driven by our sympathetic nervous system.

And the structure that holds that day together has just come off completely.

The other thing worth noting is that it's even worse in restrained eaters

when a lot of the self-control resources have been depleted across the course of a day.

So if they've had to really commit and be quite what they would term discipline

and use their willpower across a day,

and not necessarily just in food,

but in other areas when they wanted to say something but had to hold their tongue

or, you know, whatever that is,

then it's going to be worse at night than it otherwise would be.

Now, the situation-locked version doesn't follow the clock at all.

And it's not true that emotional eating only occurs at night.

There were a few phone-based studies that looked particularly across a day,

and it was only 764 people,

but they answered multiple surveys a day for one to three weeks,

and feeling bored, irritated, stressed is associated with more craving at that moment

and with craving at the next check-in.

So it's just when that emotion occurs,

people are far more likely to gravitate towards or want to eat foods they otherwise wouldn't.

So if it's the same window of time most nights that you are experiencing this emotional eating,

you want to look at the front half of the day and at sleep before you look at anything else.

Is there anything that you can do around problem-solving in those areas

to help mitigate what you're experiencing at night?

If your emotional eating shows up across any time of the day

and tracks with what happened rather than being clock-driven,

then that is definitely a problem that is less about the mechanical stuff

and much more about the emotional piece.

One of the first recommendations to help combat emotional eating

is having a regular eating structure.

Eat at planned intervals roughly every four or so hours,

regardless of how the day is going emotionally.

The body loves structure.

It loves routine.

And the physiological amplifier gets removed.

So if you're pretty chaotic with your food,

then this will help bring your appetite signal more in alignment with when you should be eating.

And when eating is no longer contingent on mood or on how the day is gone,

the emotional signal can become visible.

So regardless of, I guess, whether it is situational

or whether it's sort of tied to the clock,

one of the first things I recommend people do

is just get into the habit of having a regular eating structure.

Chaotic eating will drive hunger,

and that will only impact more on the emotional state that you're experiencing

that can trigger emotional eating and stress eating.

So we want to remove the hunger signal that might amplify your emotive state.

So eating consistently is actually really great for the body as well.

Like the body likes routine,

and hunger is better regulated when you're more routine and structured around the food that you eat.

If you're chaotic with your food,

then your body doesn't know when that next meal is coming in.

So you can feel more hunger because everyone is in the dark about when you're next going to eat.

So have structured meals around those pillars of nutrition

that I've just briefly mentioned before,

but you hear me talk about all the time.

That will help with your energy, help balance blood sugar.

It will help your body's anticipatory response to food,

and that is going to help delineate what is an emotion that you're responding to,

and what is hunger.

So that is one of the first things to consider.

The second thing to do is track the trigger.

So for two weeks, log what happens immediately before you eat.

What situation was it?

What was the emotion?

What intensity?

So this isn't about tracking the food.

It's about tracking the feelings around the food.

And so most people discover that their triggers are far narrower than what they thought.

It's usually two or three specific situations.

The gap between arriving home and starting dinner.

The hour after a meeting that went badly.

Sunday afternoon.

The point isn't which ones they are.

It's that the list is short, and it's your list of predictable triggers.

And over a couple of weeks, two to three weeks, you can absolutely sort of dial that in.

And this actually has been tested head to head against planning.

So there is something to an if-then plan as well.

So what I mean by if-then is if situation X occurs, then I will do Y.

And it's much better to try and add behaviours to your list rather than avoid doing a certain behaviour.

For example, you don't want your plan to be just simply, if I come home from work wound up,

I'm going to avoid going into the kitchen and raiding the pantry.

Like, that sort of negative, that taking away or saying that you're not going to do something has actually found to be not that helpful if you look at the literature.

So it's much better to have a planned behaviour that you're going to do in place.

Like, if I come home from work wound up, I'm going to go for a walk around the block.

Like, you've got something that you're layering in rather than trying to avoid doing something.

And possibly in life, that's actually just a good rule to have anyway.

And it's much better for you to have just one plan for one situation rather than having multiple plans.

Because multiple plans can muddy the waters a bit and may not be as effective when you're suddenly faced with four things that you could be doing.

It's much better just to take that decision fatigue away.

Because when you are stressed or you are highly strung or, you know, whatever, you're not, that decision fatigue could probably lead to you doing, like, not much or nothing.

So something else worth noting is, you know, name it.

So putting a feeling into words does reduce the amygdala activation in the brain and increases activity in the prefrontal regions that help regulate it.

It's called effect labelling.

So what this means is, is that practically before eating, name it out loud or in writing, I'm frustrated, I'm relieved, I'm bored, and I don't want to be alone with that.

So it does two things, right?

It buys a gap between the feeling and the behavior, which is often all that's needed.

And it helps clarify what you actually want, which is frequently not food.

And people know this as well.

Like, they're like, oh, bugger it, and all I can think about is chocolate when they're highly stressed.

And then they start half a block deep, and they're like, I didn't really want this chocolate.

So it does give you that pause.

And that can help begin to change that behavior.

Another thing worth mentioning is that these urges and these cravings, they're self-limiting.

So it's not a state that persists until you give in to it.

It rises, it peaks, and it falls, generally within about 10 or 20 minutes, whether or not you act on it.

And a lot of people don't know about this because they've never gone beyond that peak.

They've resolved every urge they've ever had by eating.

So their entire evidence base says urges end when you eat.

However, if you can wait, even if it is with a timer and you're white-knuckling it, that can not only occupy your attention, but then you can reassess.

Like, even make a deal with yourself that, you know, if in 10 minutes I still want the food, then I'm going to have it.

Great.

Just wait out that 10 minutes.

So the goal here isn't to never eat in response to an emotion, because I think that that may be pretty impossible if this is a lifetime of behavior.

The goal is to make it a choice rather than an automatic sequence.

So you have a lot more control and you have that feeling of control when you do eat.

Or on the occasion that you decide not to eat, you start to build that evidence that actually that urge will pass if I just wait it out.

And one other thing worth noting is that self-criticism after an episode of emotional eating will reliably predict more eating.

And this has been tested in the literature.

Women who scored high on restrictive eating were given an unhealthy food preload, the classic diet-breaking setup, you know.

And then half of them received a brief self-compassion prompt and the prompt reduced distress and reduced how much they subsequently ate compared with no prompt at all.

And this has actually been studied in clinical patients as well, like people with eating disorders such as bulimia or binge eating disorder.

And it's reliably been found that groups that had an opportunity to express self-compassion ate significantly less, rated the food as less pleasurable, and reported less desire to keep eating.

So always remember that the spiral after an emotional eating episode, that's the problem.

The biscuit, the half a pack of biscuits, the block of chocolate, in of itself, is far less detrimental than what happens next.

It's always about what happens next.

Now, one thing I do want to acknowledge is that if you think you are an emotional eater, or you know you're an emotional eater, most of us would know whether we are or not.

But you frequently eat past physical discomfort, you eat secretly, or there's significant distress afterwards, then I do think that's worth screening properly and referring to a psychologist with eating disorder experience.

Even like one or two sessions with someone to figure out whether this is you or not might be really helpful and might sort of open up something that you can work through with an appropriate practitioner.

Like, because behaviors like that aren't, I mean, all of this isn't about the food itself, but, you know, there's a lot that can underlie these behaviors that are worth working on if you want to get on top of it.

So, in a nutshell then, rule out under-eating, chaotic eating, under-sleeping, because a large share of what looks like emotional eating may just be physiology.

And have a think about when it happens most for you, whether it is just locked into the clock, or whether it's more about the situation.

Put that regular eating structure in place to remove the amplifier that hunger would provide.

Track the trigger rather than the food, and do this for two weeks to figure out the particular triggers, because they will be more narrow than what you imagined them to be.

Then build one if-then plan, so you've got something to do when you are triggered in that situation.

Just one. You don't want a 15 multi-stage plan going on.

Also want to delay 10 minutes before eating anything.

Just white-knuckle that 10 minutes out and wait for that urge to pass, because that urge is self-limiting, and it will pass.

And then, when you do have a lapse, and it does occur, just know that the most important thing is what happens next, isn't that that lapse occurred.

So, this is a work-on.

And for some people, this is something where they may need more professional support, just to be able to work through it.

But I hope that what you can glean from this is, this isn't a willpower issue, the way that it is often set up in our minds.

Like, oh, I just have no willpower. It's nothing like that.

This is much more about these learned behaviours, and figuring out a way to sort of crack that nut, if you like.

So guys, that's just a bit of info on emotional eating, and I've got some resources if you want to look a little bit more at some literature around it.

Hit me up. I've got it right here.

I'm over on Instagram, Threads and X, at Mickey Willardin, Facebook, at Mickey Willardin Nutrition, or head to my website, mickeywillardin.com, and book a one-on-one call with me.

All right, guys. Have the best week. See you later.