How to Overcome Emotional Eating in Midlife

You’ve had a long day and are tired and stressed, and before you know it, you are reaching for snacks and maybe a glass of wine—not out of hunger but for comfort. You also feel that you’ve been doing it more recently but can’t seem to get a handle on it. Does this sound familiar?

Let's be clear: everyone emotionally eats. Eating sweet and salty foods provides dopamine to the brain, giving you immediate comfort and release. 

Emotional eating is only a problem if:

      👉🏾 you are doing it more than you’d like, 

      👉🏾 you have negative feelings, such as guilt or shame, associated with it, or

      👉🏾 It leads to emotional overeating. 

If you struggle with emotional eating, there is good news. You can learn to manage it Without relying on willpower and restriction (which don’t work in the long run). 

This article will address how the hormonal changes in perimenopause contribute to emotional eating and how to break free from it without relying on willpower or restriction.

The Perimenopause-Emotional Eating Connection

Sex hormones impact every physiological structure in your body, and you start to notice its impact during perimenopause when the reproductive hormones, estrogen and progesterone, are fluctuating. 

During perimenopause, your central nervous system changes your satiety [fullness], mood, sleep, and circadian rhythms. You may notice changes in your mood, including increased mood swings, more negative emotions (sadness, depression, and anxiety), and other strong emotions (irritability or rage).  Your feelings could also be heightened due to a lack of sleep. 

With sleep, you may notice difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, either due to hot flushes, night sweats, or emotional distress. Aging also comes with sleep issues; sleep becomes more fragmented.

When you don’t get enough sleep, your hunger hormones become dysregulated. When tired, you will be hungrier and more likely to reach for sugary snacks to energize you. You may also notice an intense craving for higher-calorie foods. 

On top of the hormonal changes, perimenopause coincides with midlife, which has its own set of challenges, such as caring for your children, aging parents, and more responsibility in your career. Or, perhaps, you are questioning what to do in this phase of your life.  

All these factors combined can make you more likely to seek comfort in food. Initially, you may not notice it, but over time, this could lead to eating more than your body needs and may be one reason for your midlife weight gain.

Strategies to Break Free From Emotional Eating

Before we address what to do, let’s briefly discuss why willpower and restriction don’t work.  

Willpower requires mental effort. For it to work, your brain must decide whether to tap into it. The biggest issue with willpower is that you may not have the energy to utilize it when the craving strikes. 

Restriction works temporarily. The biggest problem with restriction is that breaking it can lead to what is known as the ‘what the hell effect.’ You've already broken your promise to yourself, so “what the hell, you may continue.” When you enter the what the hell cycle, the result is typically overindulgence and more negative feelings. 

So, what to do instead?

The answer is to build skills to address emotional eating before, during, and after a craving and practice them repeatedly until they become habitual.  

When you build a habit, you go through five stages, which I call the Momentum Method:

1️⃣ Awareness

2️⃣ Simplify

3️⃣ Strategize

4️⃣ Refine

5️⃣ Accelerate

Here are some examples of using these five stages to work through emotional eating. 

#1  Awareness:

You will learn how to address emotional eating at different phases in this stage.  

#2 Simplify:

This involves narrowing your focus down to one to two things you could do to reduce the likelihood of having a craving, such as making sure you are eating enough food or finding behaviors to build a stress toolkit that allows you to manage your stress without turning to food.

#3  Strategize:

Once you have figured out your blind spots, you can create a plan to address them. For example, if you are not eating enough during the day, can you start by making one meal more nutrient-dense by adding more protein and fiber? Or can you add 5 minutes of a stress-relieving activity into your day to reduce your overall stress load?

#4  Refine:

In this phase, you track your outcome and compassionately assess what is working and what needs to be improved. Failure will be part of the process, so learning how to adjust as necessary is critical. Your successes and failures leave clues; you must learn to analyze what is happening.

#5  Accelerate:

In this phase, you strengthen what is working. You will also notice an identity shift. You become the version of yourself that can manage emotions without always turning to food.  This is the transformation you seek. Contrary to what you may have heard, it may take longer than 30 days, but using the Momentum Method, you will get small wins, keeping you going.

The bottom line is that you don’t need to rely on willpower or restriction to stop emotional eating.  You can figure out a plan that works for you, will have you experiencing small wins, and will leave you feeling empowered.  Over time, you will shift from someone who struggles with emotional eating to someone who can confidently manage their cravings. 

If you would like to earn more, join the Break Free From Emotional Workshop, where I’ll walk you through strategies to improve emotional resilience, manage your cravings, and retrain your brain so you can transform your relationship with food.  

Click here to learn more.