How many times have you turned to ice cream or cheesecake at the end of a bad day? Your emotional health has a direct impact on how you experience food. This is according to new research from the University of Wurzburg in Germany, which found that you eat fatty foods when you’re feeling down because you’re less likely to taste the fat in food.
For the study, a group of volunteers sampled a variety of creamy drinks that contained different amounts of fat. However, before they did so, they were shown three different videos; one depicting a happy scene, one depicting a sad scene, and one depicting a neutral scene. While the latter video had no influence on the volunteers’ taste buds, the participants were less able to tell the drinks apart after watching the two emotional clips. This means that your emotions impact your sensory perceptions of food, and what you really need has nothing to do with cheesecake. If you can break this pattern of emotional eating, you can drastically influence your wellbeing, so what can you do?
According to registered dietician Cynthia Sass, who has master’s degrees in both nutrition science and public health, ‘Whether you’re walking around with anger, sadness, or anxiety bottled up inside, allowing it to fester ups the chances that you’ll use food to detach, or stuff it back down. For this reason, I often advise my clients to find healthy ways to release their feelings, like watching a tearjerker to have a good cry, or furiously scrubbing the tub to let out aggression.’
Still, when you’re watching that tearjerker, it can be tempting to grab that bar of chocolate sitting in the fridge. Cynthia says, ‘Over the years I’ve had numerous clients tell me that they can’t keep certain foods around, because if they’re there, they’ll eat them, especially when they’re emotional.’ Banishing fatty foods can be difficult when you don’t live alone, but Cynthia advises ‘making them harder to get to. Research shows (and my own experience confirms) that the fewer steps you have to go through to get to a food, the more likely you are to eat it, and vice versa.’ So put your cookies in another bag, then in a sealed container, and then up on a high shelf that’s hard to reach. After that, are you really going to go to all the bother of getting them out again?
