Kelsey is a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist who has worked with 500+ clients to help them achieve their health and nutrition goals.
It’s Thanksgiving and you’re on your third serving of grandma’s shepherd’s pie with the extra cheese on top. It’s Christmas and you can’t stop eating that tres leches cake. It’s Sunday dinner and that sticky pudding has never tasted better.
All those scenarios describe overeating where you might eat too much, but this is periodic, not regular. That’s totally normal and nothing to feel guilty about.
However, compulsive eating is overeating regularly, if not all the time. It’s a cause for concern and an issue that’s worth addressing. Learn about the reasons behind it and the solutions to stop eating so much.
For every reason we highlight, we’ll also provide actionable solutions.
With binge eating, you may lack self-control with eating, experience disgust, distress, or guilt with yourself, and often prefer seclusion where you hoard food to eat privately.
While there’s no apparent cause for this, medical research claims that it could be genetic, hereditary from your family, or a sign of stress, low self-esteem, or depression (14).
Some people stress-eat and others stress-starve. The science behind this is that the nervous system triggers epinephrine (adrenaline) from the adrenal glands located at the top of the kidneys. Epinephrine will then start the release of cortisol, the stress hormone, in fight-or-flight responses. During this period, the body will be in an alert physiological state that places eating on hold.
However, extended stress periods mean cortisol levels will increase, and appetite causes you to eat, and the food is stored as visceral fat in the abdomen.
Research reveals that stress hormones affect eating patterns and strengthen the network toward hedonic overeating, which leads to obesity (12). Furthermore, stress can affect your preferences for high-fat and high-sugar foods. A study on animals showed that physical and emotional distress can increase the intake of fat and sugar-filled foods (12).
In summary, stress changes our eating habits and can lead to the overconsumption of food. The need to consume hyper-palatable foods such as high-fat and high-sugar foods may trigger our minds to promote compulsive eating behavior.
Read More: Eating Too Much Healthy Food: Can Good Nutrition Cause Weight Gain?
The best way to deal with stress is to work on the problem rather than dwell on it. Therefore, you should indulge in activities that reduce stress and may lower your body’s stress levels. Such activities include:
Many people suffer from sleep issues and it can create much more serious problems than eye bags if it occurs too often. Lack of sleep can cause many things, including the absence of focus due to mental fog, mood swings, and metabolic changes.
Lack of sleep affects two crucial hormones that cause appetite and satiety: leptin and ghrelin. Sleeping for short periods or not at all causes a decrease in leptin and an increase in ghrelin, which leads to overeating due to an increased appetite (11).
The study further states that acute sleep deprivation and chronic partial sleep deprivation or restriction can cause a decrease in serum leptin concentrations and a spike in ghrelin levels, which may cause increased BMI (11).
The answer is to get enough sleep so your hormone levels can standardize. According to the National Sleep Foundation, a healthy adult should sleep between 7 and 9 hours a night; babies, young children, and teens should sleep 8 to 13 hours per night; newborns, infants, and toddlers should sleep 14 to 17 hours a night; and those over 65 should get 7 to 8 hours sleep per night.
Mindless eating means you eat while distracted as you multitask between work and lunch, watching TV and snacking, or driving and eating. Mindless eating or multitasking may lead to a higher body mass index as it results in self-control lags and an imbalance between the brain’s cues and appetite to eat (9).
Therefore, the more distracted you are, the less likely you will be to notice how much food you consume.
Here are some of the solutions you can try:
Emotional eating is similar to stressful eating, except emotional eating can be due to depression, loss, grief, loss of self-esteem or self-worth, heartbreak, plus other emotions. With emotional eating, you seek comfort from food, which causes you to eat continuously without realizing that no amount of food will make you stop feeling lonely, ashamed, depressed, or heartbroken.
The solutions to emotional eating are similar to those for stress eating, but there is more focus on social support and finding ways to deal with your emotions. One of the best ways to deal with emotions is to pursue a hobby such as drawing, singing, dancing, or writing. Use your hobby to express and release the negative energy in your mind.
Read More: List of Somatic Exercises for Mental and Physical Well-Being
Dieting doesn’t necessarily result in overeating, but overly restrictive dieting, where you miss essential macronutrients, can cause cravings. For example, vegan diets can miss out on crucial omega-three acids, vitamins, and minerals, while low-fat diets, low-carb diets, and high-protein diets can result in fewer carbohydrates in your body, yet carbs are essential for energy.
Restrictive dieting may exacerbate your response to food cues, which could cause you to crave different foods and be unable to stop eating when presented with food. Therefore, with dieting, certain foods become a trigger to compulsive eating (5).
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First, we suggest that if you’re on a diet by choice and not due to a medical condition, you should try intuitive eating, a nutritional approach to eating based on your intuitive cues. This eating principle relies on the 10 principles of intuitive eating, where you’ll learn to love food, accept a relationship with food, avoid refraining from eating food, and be gentle with your body.
The following solution is to eat foods that make you feel full for longer. These are fresh foods that are minimally processed, so they’re rich in fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Such foods include:
Protein-rich foods also help keep you feeling fuller for longer and regulate your hunger hormone, ghrelin. For example, one study found that eating a high-protein breakfast decreased ghrelin levels and improved satiety feelings compared to a high-carbohydrate breakfast (3).
Also, if you plan to snack in between meals, choose healthy snacks such as high-protein, low-fat, low-sugar yogurt.
Lastly, eat regularly. Skipping meals may cause weight loss, but it’s the wrong way to lose weight. Not only do you generate an imbalance in your hormones, it could also lead to cravings and changes in eating habits. As you try to eat more regularly, start with at least three times a day, then you can include snacks in between.
Eating can redirect the brain to release dopamine as a reward that encourages you to repeat the activity until these activities (13) dominate your behavior.
The best solution is to seek medical assistance to get to the root of your food addiction. As it’s an eating disorder, you may need counseling, social support, or medication to help you deal with the condition.
The last cause as to why you overeat is alcohol influence. When you’re intoxicated, your body loses balance. It cannot lower or inhibit appetite and satiety hormones, which means you’re constantly hungry and this causes you to overeat (1).
One or two drinks may not have such an effect, but excessive drinking may lead to increased hunger levels.
It would help if you cut back on drinking alcohol to minimize your compulsive eating.
The two solutions we shall highlight below can help with all eight causes discussed above.
We’ve already mentioned this above, but a food journal or diet tracking app can help minimize overeating by highlighting your problem areas, particularly your poor eating patterns.
According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, food tracking will give you awareness and help you stick to proper eating plans, regardless of your intent to lose, gain, or maintain weight.
Hydration is a classic method to prevent overeating because you fill your body with water. While water has no direct effect on overeating, it can minimize your need to feed all the time. Moreover, choosing water over sugar-sweetened drinks can help prevent cravings for sweet drinks.
There could be many reasons for why you’re eating more than you used to. You’re probably stressed or you’re not sleeping well. Mindless eating, emotional eating, and dieting too much are some other reasons people start overeating and can’t control themselves. Some people may also eat too much because they’re under the influence of alcohol.
If you find yourself eating more than usual, evaluate the root causes and think of ways to solve the problems.
You may not be getting enough fiber, protein, or water in your diet. Alternatively, you could be consuming too many refined carbs or alcohol. Lifestyle habits, such as inadequate sleep, high stress levels, and excessive exercise, can also contribute to feelings of hunger. Try replacing these eating habits with salt-free snacks and healthier meals.
Overeating causes the stomach to extend beyond its normal size. This is to adjust to the large amount of food inside. The expanded stomach pushes against the organs, which can make you uncomfortable. This discomfort can manifest as feeling tired, sluggish, or drowsy. Your clothes may also feel tight.
Eating less can be difficult for some people because their metabolic activities are too fast, or they can’t stop eating when they’re overly emotional. Sometimes, a lack of nutrients such as fiber and protein can leave you feeling unsatisfied. It is suggested that there’s no problem if you’re eating too much healthy food, but you should complement this with activities such as exercise and better sleep to create a balanced lifestyle.
Eating too much all the time may be a cause for concern, not because of obesity or the other serious health concerns that may result from compulsive eating, but because of its mental health implications.
Compulsive eating is sometimes a mask for what you’re not ready to deal with, whether this is due to shame, low self-esteem, depression, too much work, or retaliation from too much dieting. To stop overeating, you need to decide to deal with the problem and use the solutions highlighted above to overcome the dilemma.
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