Emotional eating is eating for reasons other than hunger Instead of the physical symptom of hunger initiating the eating, an emotion triggers the eating.

How to Tell the Difference

There are several differences between emotional hunger and physical hunger:

1. Emotional hunger comes on suddenly; physical hunger occurs gradually.

2. When you are eating to fill a void that isn't related to an empty stomach, you crave a specific food, such as pizza or ice cream, and only that food will meet your need. When you eat because you are actually hungry, you're open to options.

3. Emotional hunger feels like it needs to be satisfied instantly with the food you crave; physical hunger can wait.

4. Even when you are full, if you're eating to satisfy an emotional need, you're more likely to keep eating. When you're eating because you're hungry, you're more likely to stop when you're full.

5. Emotional eating can leave behind feelings of guilt; eating when you are physically hungry does not.

Comfort Foods

When emotional hunger rumbles, one of its distinguishing characteristics is that you're focused on a particular food, which is likely a comfort food.

Comfort foods are foods a person eats to obtain or maintain a feeling. Comfort foods are often wrongly associated with negative moods, and indeed, people often consume them when they're down or depressed, but interestingly enough, comfort foods are also consumed to maintain good moods.

Ice cream is first on the comfort food list. After ice cream, comfort foods break down by sex: For women it's chocolate and cookies; for men it's pizza, steak, and casserole.

And what you reach for when eating to satisfy an emotion depends on the emotion. The types of comfort foods a person is drawn toward varies depending on their mood. People in happy moods tended to prefer ... foods such as pizza or steak (32%). Sad people reached for ice cream and cookies 39% of the time, and 36% of bored people opened up a bag of potato chips.

If you eat when you are not hungry, chances are your body does not need the calories. If this happens too often, the extra calories get stored as fat, and too much fat storage can cause one to be overweight, which may present some health risks.

According to research at the University of Maryland, 75% of overeating is caused by emotions.

Recognizing Emotional Eating

"The first thing one needs to do to overcome emotional eating is to recognize it. Keeping a food record and ranking your hunger from 1-10 each time you put something in your mouth will bring to light 'if' and 'when' you are eating for reasons other than hunger.

Next, you need to learn techniques that help manage emotions besides eating.

Oftentimes when a child is sad, we cheer them up with a sweet treat. This behavior gets reinforced year after year until we are practicing the same behavior as adults. We never learned how to deal with the sad feeling because we always pushed it away with a sweet treat. Learning how to deal with feelings without food is a new skill many of us need to learn.

Managing Emotional Eating

Here are a few tips to help you deal with emotional eating: