The fat jolly lady? An initial exploration of emotional eating

Initial warning: it helps to know your initials if you want to understand the psychology of eating.

BED - binge eating disorder, ie a tendency to consume unnaturally large amounts of food in a short time period.

EOQ Emotional Overeating Questionnaire try it out here:

EADES Eating and Appraisal Due to Emotions and Stress Questionnaire : read all about it

BMI s a number representing your weight in relation to your height find out yours here


It doesn't follow that if you are an emotional eater you will be fat. This is official, at least the peer reviewed journals seem to have bought this idea. I have come across various studies of emotional eating and there is an Emotional Overeating Questionnaire known in the trade as the EOQ

Not to mention the Eating and Appraisal Due to Emotions and Stress Questionnaire, called the EADES for short. Here's the latest article.

A blog search for " comfort eating" called up 5,944 hits, (but mind you many of those were references to the astonishing news that Jessica Simpson is comfort eating. Wow.) Now that sounds like emotional eating to me. I wonder if they have heard of the EOQ and what they would do with it if they had one?

Emotional overeating was significantly associated with binge frequency, eating disorder features, and depression, but was not related to BMI or gender. In other words you don't have to be fat to eat emotionally:

Emotional overeating and its associations with eating disorder psychopathology among overweight patients with Binge Eating Disorder.
Robin M. Masheb, PhD *, Carlos M. Grilo, PhD

It works the other way about too: my brochure from the Eating Disorders Association on emotional eating assured me that "Not all overweight people are emotional eaters."(click here if you want one.)

Now it is sensible to suppose that emotional eaters will tend to get overweight but we now know that BMI is not associated with emotional eating. So there has to be more to it than that. To put it simply, emotional eaters are addicted to food but food addicts are not necessarily overweight.

Oh no, emotional eating has more to do with psychopathology than BMI.

There's depression: here

Theres bi-polar disorder: here

And along with these there's panic disorder : here

This is much much more than just eating too much of the wrong kind of food.

Food addiction can kill you. We must get the world to see this clearly, before any more food addicts die.