Emotional eating is about more than willpower, neuroscientists say
The year 2022 may be off to a rocky start, but at least we’ve been mostly spared the typical January cleanse content from publications like The New York Times (which opted for a how-to series on intuitive eating), Bon Appétit (“the diet delusion”), and The Wall Street Journal (which profiled the anti-diet movement). Statistically speaking, most of us have likely given up any New Year’s resolutions we bothered to make, anyway. Lest we still beat ourselves up for reaching for the ice cream pint after a stressful phone call, Discover assures us emotional eating is about more than just willpower: It’s part genetics, but largely the result of how our brains are trained to reach for certain foods when we’re down or want a reward. There’s a lot we still don’t know about the reasons why we eat our feelings, but the neuroscientists have spoken! It’s not just a bad habit. —H. Claire Brown
