Why do we eat when we’re not actually hungry? I think this is one of the most interesting questions in nutrition because, after thousands of hours talking to people about how and why they eat, I can tell you that hunger is very often not the problem.
We eat because we’re hungry, obviously. But we also eat because we’re tired, stressed, lonely, bored, unhappy, celebrating or simply looking for something nice. We use food as a reward and we use it for comfort, and sometimes we learnt to do that years before we had any idea what emotional eating was.
Why childhood experiences can shape emotional eating
Think about your childhood. If you were good, did you get an ice cream? Was cake a treat? Did sweets cheer you up when you were upset? Did Friday night mean something delicious because you’d got through the week?
None of this is particularly sinister. It’s normal family life, but our brains are extremely good at making associations and those associations can stay with us for years.
There’s some fascinating science behind this. Research looking at children and eating behaviour has found links between parents using food as a reward or in response to emotions and emotional eating in children.
That doesn’t mean we should all immediately blame our fathers because they gave us a KitKat in 1978. It means we learn from what happens around us, and some of what we learn about food can become very deeply established.
Is eating when you’re not hungry a nervous-system response?
Yes, partly, although the full explanation is rather more interesting than simply saying your nervous system wants cake.
Stress affects the brain and nervous system, and it also affects hormones and the reward systems involved in eating. Research shows that stress can make highly palatable food more appealing to some people, although we don’t all respond in exactly the same way.
Then there’s habit. If something happens often enough, our brains get terribly efficient at it. A particular feeling, time of day or situation can become connected with a particular response, so eventually we can find ourselves doing something almost automatically.
There’s good research on this too: eating can be prompted by familiar cues and established habits rather than physical hunger alone.
This is why I think it’s useful to talk about the nervous system, but not to blame everything on it. Your brain, nervous system, memories, stress response, reward system and learnt habits are all talking to each other. If you’ve spent 40 years responding to a bad day with something sweet, your brain has had an awful lot of practice.
If stress, emotional exhaustion and food cravings feel closely connected for you, I explore that relationship in more detail in Can stress stop you losing weight?
How I recognised my own emotional-eating pattern
I had a very unhappy time at school and food was extremely restricted. Teatime was when I could eat, so bread, toast, butter, peanut butter and jam became incredibly important to me. They weren’t just food. They were associated with the part of the day when I finally felt fed, comfortable and safe.
I can still see that association in myself now. If I’m unhappy or that old feeling of not being good enough appears, I know perfectly well what my brain would like. It isn’t salmon and vegetables. It’s bread, peanut butter and something sweet because those are the foods my brain connected with comfort a very long time ago.
That’s been incredibly useful for me to understand. If I suddenly want bread and peanut butter, I can stop and think: am I actually hungry, or am I looking for the feeling I associate with eating it? They’re completely different things.
And this is where I think we sometimes make emotional eating far too complicated. You don’t necessarily need to spend hours analysing yourself. Sometimes you simply need to recognise the pattern.
What happened? How did I feel? What did I immediately want to eat? And have I been doing some version of this for years?
Why do I always want something sweet at night?
I see this constantly with clients. Somebody has eaten perfectly adequately during the day, had dinner and then at 9pm suddenly feels they desperately need chocolate, ice cream or biscuits.
Sometimes they’re genuinely hungry, of course, and if you’re hungry you should eat. But sometimes it’s very clearly something else.
Perhaps 10pm is when the children are finally in bed and you relax. Perhaps it’s when you stop working. Perhaps you’re lonely. Perhaps you’ve had an argument. Perhaps something sweet has simply been the punctuation mark at the end of your day for 30 years.
So before you eat it, ask yourself one very simple question: am I hungry?
If the answer is yes, have something to eat. If the answer is no, ask the second question: what am I actually looking for?
That’s when things start becoming interesting.
How can I stop eating when I’m not hungry?
This is the bit people sometimes miss. Understanding where a behaviour came from doesn’t mean we have to spend the rest of our lives doing it.
Habits are learnt and they can be changed, although obviously something you’ve practised for 40 years probably won’t disappear because you read one inspirational quote on Instagram.
You have to do something differently, and you usually have to do it more than once.
If you know 9pm is your difficult time, get ahead of it. If you’re likely to be genuinely hungry, have something sensible ready. Greek yoghurt, hummus and peppers or smoked salmon are all perfectly good options. Don’t wait until you’re tired, hungry and cross and then expect yourself to make a brilliant decision while standing in front of the fridge.
If you know you’re not hungry, change the routine. Make a cup of tea, read your book, watch something, brush your teeth, go upstairs or do whatever works for you.
You’re breaking the connection between the familiar cue and the familiar response, and the science of habit formation supports this idea that repetition and context help behaviours become automatic.
The important thing is that you’re not sitting there telling yourself you have no willpower. You’re working out what triggers the behaviour and giving yourself another response.
How childhood ideas can shape our approach to exercise too
I see a version of exactly the same thing with exercise, particularly with women over 40.
For many of us, exercise at school meant netball, hockey, lacrosse, tennis, swimming or athletics. Exercise meant sport, usually involving other people and quite often involving standing outside in the freezing cold in a gym skirt.
Then 40 years later I tell somebody that I want her doing resistance exercise in her sitting room and she doesn’t really think it counts. Ten minutes with a resistance band somehow isn’t “proper exercise” because it doesn’t look anything like the exercise she learnt when she was young.
This matters because our bodies change as we get older and what we need from exercise changes too. We lose skeletal muscle as we age unless we do something to preserve it, and resistance exercise becomes increasingly important for strength, function, body composition and bone health.
There’s very good evidence for resistance training in women after menopause, particularly for improving strength and physical function.
I explain more about the relationship between age, skeletal muscle and metabolism in Why women over 40 gain weight and how to reverse it.
So sometimes the thing we need to change isn’t simply our body. We need to change the picture in our head of what exercise is.
Resistance exercise is exercise. Ten or twenty minutes at home is exercise. You don’t have to join a netball team at 60 to prove you’ve moved your body.
Your past explains things, but it doesn’t have to decide them
I don’t think there’s anything particularly useful about blaming our parents for how we eat at 50, 60 or 70. Most parents were doing what they thought was right at the time, and none of us gets through childhood without picking up habits and associations along the way.
What is useful is understanding them.
If cake means comfort, why? If you always want food when you’re unhappy, when did that start? If you think exercise only counts when you’re sweating for an hour, where did that idea come from?
Once you can see the pattern, you can decide whether it still makes sense for the person and body you have today.
This is really what I mean when I talk about not getting trapped in an old nervous-system response. We’re not frozen at ten years old. Our brains continue to learn, and we can practise different behaviours until they become more familiar too.
It takes some work because the old response has had years of practice, but that doesn’t make it permanent.
So the next time you find yourself looking for something to eat when you know perfectly well you’re not hungry, stop for a second before you open the cupboard. Ask yourself what you’re actually looking for.
The answer may have started in childhood, but what you do next doesn’t have to.
If you would like personal support understanding emotional eating, changing long-established habits and creating a healthier relationship with food, my Reclaim Your Life programme brings together nutrition, eating psychology, exercise, motivation and accountability.
References
- Wang J, Zhu B, Wu R, Chang Y-S, Cao Y, Zhu D. Bidirectional associations between parental non-responsive feeding practices and child eating behaviors: a systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal prospective studies. Nutrients. 2022;14(9):1896.
- Masih T, Dimmock JA, Epel ES, Guelfi KJ. Stress-induced eating and the relaxation response as a potential antidote: a review and hypothesis. Appetite. 2017;118:136–143.
- van’t Riet J, Sijtsema SJ, Dagevos H, De Bruijn GJ. The importance of habits in eating behaviour: an overview and recommendations for future research. Appetite. 2011;57(3):585–596.
- Gardner B. A review and analysis of the use of ‘habit’ in understanding, predicting and influencing health-related behaviour. Health Psychology Review. 2015;9(3):277–295.
- González-Gálvez N, Moreno-Torres JM, Vaquero-Cristóbal R. Resistance training effects on healthy postmenopausal women: a systematic review with meta-analysis. Climacteric. 2024;27(3):296–304.
