Joy Kong, MD, traces emotional eating to coping mechanisms formed during major life stress like breakups or divorce, plus childhood habits. She compares persistent patterns to addiction because we're wired to avoid emotional pain, and old habits become hard to break.
I remember before the breakup happened, I was gaining the weight and I was eating the food to gain the weight and it did taste good, right? But after a breakup or a significant life change like that, the food became my comfort. Yeah. What more did you learn? So I realized the power of emotional eating and why people get stuck there if they've been doing that for years and decades. It's like a drug addict trying to break the drug addiction. If you go through hard life situations, whether it's a breakup, a divorce, bankruptcy, whatever it is, we as humans don't like to sit in pain. We are not comfortable being in pain, whether it's physical pain or emotional pain. And so we develop these coping mechanisms that probably aren't the healthiest for us because maybe as a young kid, we kind of started to gravitate towards food as an escape. And then now that you become older, wiser, more self aware, you start to realize those things don't really serve me anymore.
