Episode
Is It Emotional Eating, or Are You Just Under-Fuelled?
- Podcast
- Mikkipedia
- Published
- Sep 6, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1250
- Processing state
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- https://share.transistor.fm/s/2ae5c427
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Summary
Episode Summary This is a solo Mini Mikkipedia on emotional eating, prompted by a practitioner who asked Mikki how to help a client who describes herself as a lifelong emotional eater — someone who eats when she is stressed, eats when the day has been long and she finally sits down, and has tried everything she has read about without anything sticking. Rather than going straight to coping strategies, Mikki starts by asking whether it is emotional eating at all. The answer she gives is careful. Emotional eating is measured by questionnaires like the Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire and the Emotional Eating Scale, but when high scorers are put in a lab under a genuinely induced negative mood, they largely do not eat more than anyone else — and the group that reliably does eat more is restrained eaters, meaning dieters. That does not make emotional eating imaginary: it shows up consistently in clinical binge eating, and phone-based sampling in ordinary life does show boredom, stress and low mood preceding craving. Mikki's position is that someone calling themselves an emotional eater is describing something real but may have the mechanism wrong. A large share of it, she argues, is under-fuelling, chaotic eating and under-sleeping with an emotional trigger sitting on top — so the mechanical causes come first, and only what survives that audit is worth treating as an emotional problem. The second half is practical: regular eating structure, tracking the trigger rather than the food, one if-then plan, affect labelling, and letting a self-limiting urge pass. Useful if you work with clients who use this label about themselves, or you use it about yourself. Key Topics Why the emotional eating questionnaires may not measure what they claim — high scorers largely do not eat m…