The current study explored the phenomenology of emotional eating, that is, the descriptive knowledge of what one perceives, senses, and knows in one's immediate awareness and experience during emotional eating. Eight individuals with emotional eating were interviewed twice using explicitation interviewing. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis, which resulted in nine themes describing the diachronic (or temporal) unfolding of emotional eating and several sub-themes that described various synchronic (or experiential) dimensions of this unfolding. The core findings of this study support the escape theory of emotional eating and recommend future directions to investigate the self-related shifts proposed by this theory. Namely, the findings show that individuals tend to use food to regulate their emotions by reducing the unpleasant experience of negative emotions and the associated unpleasant narrative processing or ruminations about stressors that caused the negative emotions. This then leads to an urge to eat associated with a desire for the sensory experience of eating. Eating then enables individuals to reduce thoughts about their stressors and bring themselves into the present moment through embodiment. Future quantitative research could investigate this mechanism of shifting from narrative to embodied processing to regulate emotions in emotional eating to develop treatment programs, such as mindfulness-based programs, that could encourage such a shift and emotion regulation without the use of food.
Keywords: Eating; Emotional eating; Emotions; Phenomenology; Qualitative.
Emotional eating, or overeating when feeling negative emotions, is problematic because it is linked with being overweight or having obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. So far, several theories have been proposed to explain the psychological experiences of a person that leads them to emotionally eat. In this study, we explored the subjective experience, or phenomenology, of emotional eating. We interviewed eight individuals with emotional eating using a method called explicitation interviewing, which was developed to allow an interviewer to help an individual describe their subjective experience or phenomenology of a particular event or experience. Upon analyzing the data, we found support for the escape theory of emotional eating, which states that individuals eat to regulate their emotions by escaping the unpleasant feelings and thoughts that they experience while feeling negative emotions. We found that emotional eaters escape unpleasant thoughts and feelings about their past, future, or identity by shifting their attention away from these thoughts and emotions and towards the bodily sensations that they feel in the present moment while eating. Our findings encourage future studies that further investigate these shifts in attention to develop treatment methods that can help individuals regulate their emotions without using food.
© 2022. The Author(s).