Emotional Eating Therapy

Tired of your relationship with food controlling or limiting your life? You can learn to create a healthy relationship with food and your body.

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CALL US (832) 559-2622

Emotional Eating Therapy
in Houston, TX and Online

Are You an Emotional Eater?

Do food cravings or the urge to eat come out of nowhere?
Do you use food to reward yourself or as a primary source of stress relief or pleasure?
Do you procrastinate or distract yourself from unpleasant tasks or negative emotions by reaching for food?
Are you tired of feeling guilty for eating foods you love?
Have you postponed or avoided life activities because of your weight?
Are you tired of the cycle of weight gain and weight loss only to regain again?

Emotional eating therapy can help you get back on track.

We specialize in helping you overcome emotional eating, binge eating, overeating, compulsive eating, yo-yo dieting and other forms of disordered eating. Our approach is integrative addressing the multiple mind, body and emotional factors that can lead to emotional eating.

Take Back Control of Your Life With
Emotional Eating Counseling

Give us a call at 832-559-2622 to find out more about Emotional Eating Therapy in Houston. Or click "Get Started Now" to schedule an appointment online with our Emotional Eating Counseling counselors today. We have therapists near the Montrose, Heights & Sugar Land neighborhoods and offer online therapy in multiple states.

Book an Appointment

CALL US (832) 559-2622

What is Emotional Eating?

Emotional eating is consuming food in response to cues other than biological hunger. Such as eating as a means of avoidance, procrastination, stress management, coping with feelings, boredom, loneliness or vulnerability, self-soothing, comfort or eating for other non-hunger emotional cues. Even pleasant emotions can be triggering.

We all eat emotionally some of the time, comfort eat, stress eat, and use food to regulate our emotions.

Dealing with your feelings by restricting food, overeating, only eating “healthy food”, grazing, or reaching for comfort food are all different ways of emotionally eating.

Your eating habit can be that of an emotional eater even if you avoid junk food or make healthy food choices. Emotion driven eating refers how we eat vs what we eat.

When food becomes your primary coping strategy it becomes problematic and is referred to as emotional eating or compulsive overeating.

Food cravings however, don’t necessarily indicate that you are an emotional eater. Eating habits such as skipping meals, fasting, or avoiding food groups such as carbs, can all lead to food cravings, reaching for food and even binge eating.

It's Really Not About The Food

Then Why Can’t I Stop Eating?

Many issues with food aren’t really about food at all. They indicate that something in life is out of balance. For some people, it might be habit, or “in front of me” eating.

For others, it can indicate that the body is out of balance. Whether due to chronic stress, hormones, irregular eating patterns, restricting food groups, eating “naked” carbs, brain chemistry, or other physical imbalances. These types of imbalances often lead to strong cravings and ups and downs in energy.

What’s important here is to learn ways to balance your body’s chemistry. Having a thorough evaluation with your doctor of blood work, thyroid, hormones, vitamin deficiencies and blood sugar can also be important.

Mental health issues (such as in depression, trauma or ADHD), unmet emotional needs, lack of pleasure, and feeling stressed all the time can contribute to emotional imbalances.

Therapy for emotional eating is integrative and will help you identify both physical and emotional eating triggers so you can overcome emotional eating.

Do You Emotionally Eat As Your Primary Coping Strategy?

Many people experience distraction, comfort, soothing, or safety in food. Sometimes food is comforting a clear trigger such as anger and shame over a negative performance evaluation. Most often, it comes on mindlessly due to a subtle emotional trigger such as boredom, irritability, or simply the need to take a break.

While this may take the edge off stress in the short-term, reaching for food as your primary coping strategy can become an addiction or an eating disorder in the long-term.

If you’re like many people feeling out of control with food, the knee-jerk reaction is to try and control food, for example, through dieting. Diets don’t work in the long run and can lead to further complications. In fact, food restriction, fasting or skipping meals can often cause bingeing later.

You can heal from the inside out. Many diet and weight loss programs only address food or healthy lifestyle behaviors, leaving you without the tools you really need to heal.

This is not a quick weight loss solution, but rather a long-term physical and emotional health solution. In therapy, you will learn to tune into and respond to your body’s needs in a way that nurtures and supports your best self.

Therapy for Emotional Eating Can Help You:

Learn to recognize, understand, and meet your needs
Take the judgment out of food and make peace with food, mind, and body
Stop emotional eating and conquer cravings
Assert yourself and communicate your needs with others
Challenge limiting body and food related beliefs
Cope with emotions such as depression, anxiety, anger, and loneliness without the use of food
Increase self acceptance and body image
Decrease feelings of inadequacy or lack of control in life
Return to your body’s natural and healthy weight
Live your life based on your values
Let go of shame and self-judgment
Set healthy boundaries in your life and relationships
Develop new strategies for stress relief, soothing, comfort and pleasure

top therapist in houston and sugar land texas

Emotional Eating Counseling FAQ's

Is Emotional Eating an Eating Disorder?

Rachel 2-9-22

If you are feeling out of control with food a natural solution is to attempt to control emotional eating.

Unfortunately, the more we try to gain control over food, which is a natural biological instinct, the more out of control we become.

Over time, this can only make you feel worse and increase negative feelings of guilt or shame.

If you use food to avoid uncomfortable emotions, it feeds the cycle of emotional eating that becomes a risk factor for developing an eating disorder. Not an emotional eating disorder per se, but rather developing into a disordered eating pattern that can become an eating disorder.

Here's how:

You may become more restrictive with food in an attempt to control overeating, only to find yourself binge eating later.
Restrictive eating can also be a way of calming yourself or feeling in control of your emotions. Over time this can lead to an emotional eating disorder.
Or you may limit food groups until your list of "bad foods" is so limiting, it robs you of your energy, impacts your social life and takes up too much mental space.
You may discover that focusing on controlling food distracts you from the stress in your life and becomes an "effective" way of dealing with your feelings.

For many people, eating disorders develop after a pattern of emotion driven or disordered eating.

Get emotional eating help now and learn healthy ways to gain control of emotional eating before it takes control of you.

What is Attuned, Intuitive, or Mindful Eating?

What is Attuned Eating?

Attuned eaters distinguish emotional hunger from physical hunger. Attuned eating means paying attention to your body's hunger, fullness and satisfaction signals. It also means differentiating stomach hunger from mouth hunger or meal hunger from snack hunger for example.

If you have physical hunger, you can identify what and how much to eat. If it's an emotional hunger, you can learn to identify the emotional need and what would truly satisfy you.

What is Intuitive Eating?

Intuitive eating is a process of attuned eating and letting go of food rules and "good and bad" foods while respecting and moving your body, practicing kindness and self-compassion, coping with emotions and honoring your health.

Intuitive eating isn't necessarily about healthy eating or avoiding junk food or comfort food. Eating intuitively doesn't mean that you don't eat emotionally some of the time or you eat every snack or meal mindfully. You're human after all!

Rather, it's listening to your body's internal cues and responding to them most of the time. And some of the time food is just fun, or pleasurable.

In fact, many people who identify as an emotional eater are more knowledgeable than the average person about diet and nutrition, healthy living and have high levels of will power.

Mindful eating simply refers to being in the present moment with your food, including engaging all of your senses into the entire process of preparing, appreciating, smelling, tasting, chewing, and swallowing your food.

Making peace with food and becoming an attuned eater involves 3 primary internal stages:

Physiology

Practicing physical self-care including sleep, not skipping meals
Honoring your hunger
Recognizing and respecting fullness
Discovering satiety and satisfaction from food
Movement and exercise
Honoring health

Thoughts/Mindset

Rejecting diet mentality
Awareness of and elimination of food rules
Recognizing core beliefs about self
Challenging negative self-talk about food and body image

Feelings & Emotions

Awareness of the connection between mood and food
Coping with feelings and stress without using food
Practicing mindfulness skills
Focusing on values vs. fears
Self-soothing skills

Make Peace with Food Therapy Group

Do You Offer Nutritional Therapy?

A dietician may also be beneficial for you in your recovery from emotional eating or an eating disorder.

Eddins Counseling Group is a mental health counseling center. We offer emotional eating therapy, but we do not offer nutritional therapy. We will provide referrals to dietitians in the community to complement your emotional eating counseling services.

Nutritional therapy is not about meal plans or food journals (though a food and mood journal can be helpful). Rather, it is about finding a balance of food choices that do not trigger food cravings and maintain energy levels while establishing a consistent eating rhythm.