Bariatric Surgery and the Emotional Eating Cycle
Occasionally using food as a pick-me-up, a reward, or to celebrate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when eating is your primary emotional coping mechanism—when your first impulse is to open the refrigerator whenever you’re stressed, upset, angry, lonely, exhausted, or bored—you get stuck in an unhealthy cycle where the real feeling or problem is never addressed.
If this set of thoughts and behaviours exist pre-bariatric surgery unless tackled psychologically, they will continue to exist post bariatric surgery too, putting your weight loss success at risk. So, it is important to understand and then learn to break your emotional eating cycle.
The diagram below outlines the key stages of the cycle. Using the cycle, reflect on the last time you were overcome with emotionally eating:
- What happened to trigger it, what situation occurred?
- What feelings were you experiencing?
- What foods did you choose to eat and how much of them?
- Did you feel powerless in your eating or simply chose not to stop or to care?
- What feelings and thoughts occurred afterwards?
Through answering these questions, you can start to understand your own emotional eating cycle better and this gives you the information you need to also start making changes that can break your cycle and lead to; a heathier relationships with food and a reduced risk of weight regain after bariatric surgery.
Food and Hunger
Emotional hunger can’t be filled with food. Eating may feel good in the moment, but the feelings that triggered the eating are still there. And you often feel worse than you did before because of the unnecessary calories you’ve just consumed. You beat yourself up for messing up and not having more willpower. Basically your internal dialogue becomes incredibly negative with self-blame and in some cases self-hatred, all having a detrimental impact on your mental health and wellbeing.
Compounding the problem, you stop learning healthier ways to deal with your emotions, you have a harder and harder time controlling your weight, and you feel increasingly powerless over both food and your feelings. But no matter how powerless you feel over food and your feelings, it is possible to make a positive change. You can learn healthier ways to deal with your emotions, avoid triggers, conquer cravings, and finally put a stop to emotional eating.
Next Steps
If you are struggling with breaking your emotional eating cycle alone, and feel you would benefit from accessing some additional support to help you develop a healthier relationship with food to enhance your chances of weight loss success after having bariatric surgery.
Please contact us at [email protected] for more information on how to access that support or head over to the Directory for a list of therapists who can provide you with one to one personal sessions. Click link here to access the directory. Or become a member of the Centre for Bariatric Support membership portal, and access all the archived videos of past support groups providing advice and guidance on topics like this one and many, many more. Click here for link to membership page.
