It's 9 p.m. and the phone rings. Your mother is calling. Can you take her to the doctor tomorrow? This morning's difficult conversation with a client starts looping in your head like a backbeat. Then your daughter emails to say she can't take the vacation you've been planning.

The jitters start, not so much butterflies as bees, an uncomfortable fluttering in the head and chest. All you want is quiet -- quiet and a chocolate-chip cookie. You open the fridge and stare. There's last night's leftover lasagna. You warm it up and suck in the steaming bites while standing at the counter. The jitters are calmer but still there. No, you realize, you do need chocolate. You pull the cookies down from above the cupboard and pour a glass of milk. By the third cookie, the anxiety is fading, replaced by a dull, familiar, and oddly comforting ache in your stomach.

It's natural to eat for both physical sustenance and emotional comfort. We raise our glasses in toasts, feast in celebration, and share casseroles in times of loss. And most people have, on occasion, turned to food as a crutch, nervously munching through the cheese plate at a cocktail party or rhythmically crunching popcorn to focus the mind while working on a deadline.

But there's a difference, experts say, between finding emotional nourishment in food and using food to protect yourself from emotions. Emotional eating -- eating when you're not hungry and not stopping when you're full -- occurs when you use food as a substitute for participating in your life, says Geneen Roth, author of "When Food Is Love." "It becomes the way you disengage," explains Roth. "It becomes the way you numb yourself, the way you withdraw, the way you protect yourself, the way you hide."

Finding your way back to a healthy relationship with food starts when you reconnect with both your body and your emotions. "It's about developing a kindness toward yourself," says Roth. That entails the deep work of learning to recognize and experience your feelings, and the practical work of finding strategies to replace the habit of turning to food for comfort. It also means recognizing and undoing the lessons of a culture that teaches women to mistrust their bodies.

Who Does It -- And Why?
There aren't hard statistics on how many people engage in emotional eating. But if you think you can pick them out in a crowd, you're wrong. "You can't tell by looking at someone," says Roth. Not all emotional eaters are overweight, nor are all overweight people emotional eaters. "It's anybody who uses food as a substitute for their feelings."

Stress, anxiety, loneliness, and fatigue are common triggers, and many women turn to food to quell anger. "It can be anything that is uncomfortable to feel," says Roth. "Anything you want to stuff down."

Many emotional eaters share a tendency toward perfectionism, says Nadine Taylor, author of "Runaway Eating," a book that focuses on the gray area between healthy eating and diagnosable eating disorders. "They don't just want to do a good job," says Taylor. "They want to do an impossible job. They believe their lovability depends on how they look and what their performance is." 

For perfectionists, there's often a big difference between the ideal of how they think life should be -- the flawless house, job, garden, marriage, dress size -- and how they see their daily existence, says Jennifer Best, Ph.D., a clinical health psychologist at the Duke Center for Integrative Medicine in Durham, North Carolina. Dwelling on imperfections (whether they are real or perceived) and devoting one's primary energy to "measuring up" can lead to depression and anxiety, two of the main triggers of emotional eating.

Why do some women turn to food, and not other vices? For one thing, says Taylor, it's more socially acceptable. Women who might never consider abusing drugs or alcohol can find themselves sliding into emotional eating. "It's less obvious that it's an unhealthy
thing," Taylor says.

Emotional eating, however, can have a druglike effect, says Best. Studies show that foods rich in sugar and fat are associated with the release of the body's natural opioids, neurotransmitters that affect the perception of pleasure and pain. And there's some preliminary evidence that levels of serotonin (a mood-boosting neurotransmitter) rise when carbohydrates are consumed. 

These effects, says Best, are most likely a "complex interplay" of chemistry and psychology. On the latter side, the brain associates certain foods with positive feelings and starts craving more. If one of your happiest memories is riding bikes to the softserve stand with your sister, for instance, you may crave ice cream whenever you're feeling low.

How to Heal
Regardless of whether you've been dieting since you were 12 or have never stepped on a scale in your life, you're influenced by the "diet mentality" that pervades our culture, say experts. This mind-set causes us to view hunger with suspicion, even hostility, and instead rely on ideas to tell us when and what to eat. We choose meals based on how much we've already eaten that day, the advice we read in a nutrition magazine, what our diet dictates, or recommendations from our mother, health-conscious best friend, or trainer.

Among the biggest problems with this ideas-based approach to eating, experts say, is that it causes women to disconnect from their bodies. As women learn to ignore hunger, they also learn to ignore the physiological signals that they're full. For women who've spent their lives dieting, this pattern can be especially pronounced. "For every diet there's an equal but opposite binge," says Roth. "It's the fourth law of the universe."

For Roth, who has led workshops for emotional eaters for more than 30 years, relearning how to listen to and trust your body is the first step to recovery. The main principle? Eat when you're hungry, and stop when you're full. This may sound simple, but just recognizing hunger is hard for some women. To this end, Roth recommends consciously shifting your focus from external ideas to internal sensations. "When presented with food, ask yourself, 'Am I hungry?'" advises Roth. "Check your mouth, throat, and abdomen.

How do you feel?" If you feel hungry, give yourself permission to eat. When you're hungry, sit down, put your food on a plate, eat in full view of people, and take pleasure in the food. And then "listen." The moment your body says it has had enough, stop eating. Reassure yourself that the next time you're hungry, you'll be able to eat. There are no rules to rebel against; there's no deprivation. You're choosing to stop because you're no longer hungry. Then put the food away.

This practice often takes time to master, says Roth, because for many women, responding to hunger is a terrifying idea."Women are afraid that if they let themselves eat when they're hungry, they would never stop." In fact, though, "it's exactly the opposite." Feeding real hunger leads to feeling full, says Roth. It's feeding emotional needs with food that makes women feel like they're a bottomless well. Their true motivation for eating "never gets addressed," says Roth. "So that continues to haunt them."

Along with listening to your body, identifying what triggers your unhealthy eating habits is essential to undoing them. Triggers can be idiosyncratic, says Taylor, who lists six categories:

• Social triggers: public speaking, first dates, cocktail parties
  
• Food triggers: french fries, pasta, whatever your greatest weakness is
  
• Body triggers: fatigue, pain, or PMS
  
• Thought triggers: dwelling on an old argument, worrying about the holidays
  
• Feeling triggers: melancholy, anxiety, loneliness, boredom
  
• Environmental triggers: dressing rooms, all-you-can-eat buffets

To connect the dots between your food and feelings, both Taylor and Roth stress the importance of keeping a food journal. Whenever you have an emotional-eating episode or find yourself thinking about food, note your emotional state, the time of day, and the surrounding events. Say, for example, you powered through your lunch leftovers at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, after a difficult meeting with your boss. What were you really feeling? Be honest with yourself. Were you hungry, or did you really want someone to duct tape your boss to her chair and push her down the hall with a lampshade over her head?

"What we're talking about is learning to care for yourself," says Roth, in the same way you'd care for a dear friend or a child. If you were with a 6-year-old who was crying about something that happened at school, asks Roth, "would you stick a cookie in her hand and say, 'Don't tell me about what's going on. Eat.'?"

At the deepest level, healing starts with awareness. As Roth explains it, emotional eating is "automatic," unthinking behavior. When you increase your awareness, you stop tuning out and start being there for yourself -- in body and spirit. You become, says Roth, "a companion in your own life."

Text by Celina Ottaway