Cues Promoting 'Emotional Eating' Under Study

Many people, at one point or another in their lives, decide they want to lose weight. While on paper, it's all well and good, with fixed eating schedules, and the amount of allowed calories per day clearly established, in reality, things are a lot different. One of the main reasons why so large discrepancies exist between theory and practice in this regard is the presence of emotions. This issue is not even addressed in most diet books, and researchers say this is a shame.

They state that the scenario occurs very frequently, and that it has a considerable influence on the overall result of a diet. For example, after returning home from a hard day at work, or suffering from another type of emotional distress, many reach for their favorite chocolate bars, or for ice cream, completely oblivious to, or ignoring the fact that they are on a diet. The long-term success of their efforts is therefore sabotaged by their own hand, and very few weight-loss programs appear to be aware of these phenomena, PhysOrg reports.

The key issue here, a new study shows, is providing people who usually eat to calm their emotions with other means of calming themselves, and getting a grip on how they feel, other than food. Given that most of those who are on a diet don't even know they have this problem, coping with emotions is done automatically when the need arises, through indulging in foods that are forbidden during diet. Researchers at the Temple University Center for Obesity Research are currently trying to find the answers to these problems. They believe that progress in this area could allow for more people to succeed in losing unwanted weight.

The new weight loss investigation is funded with grant money from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Its objective is to design treatments and dietary plans that also address emotional eating scenarios, with the goal of reducing their incidence, or making them a thing of the past altogether. “The problem that we’re trying to address is that the success rates for long-term weight loss are not as good as we would like them to be. Emotional eating may be one reason why people don’t do as well in behavioral weight loss groups, because these groups don’t address emotional eating or any of its contributing factors,” says CORE postdoctoral fellow Edie Goldbacher.