What Kind of Eater Are You?

Interpretation

Restrained eating style: High levels of restrained eating patterns can show up as eating in response to food rules such as “I can only eat low fat or low sugar foods” or “I can’t eat after 8 pm” or even “I shouldn’t eat those foods because I’m on a diet”. It could also look like eating because it’s “lunch time” or “dinner time” but forgetting to check in with your body’s actual physical hunger levels. Instead of responding to your body’s physical needs, if you are eating in a restrained style you are likely to be “intellectualising” your food decisions and using your thoughts rather than your body to determine whether you should eat and how much to eat.

Emotional eating style: High levels of emotional eating patterns can show up as eating in response to emotional cues like feeling happy, sad, anxious, overwhelmed, angry etc. People who engage in emotional eating behaviours often have strengthened this pathway of using food to help to regulate these emotions over time and can find it hard to resist the desire to eat when these emotions show up. If you are eating in response to emotions you might notice that it takes a long time to “feel full” when eating this way or you often eat past the point of feeling full. You may dissociate whilst eating like this ie become disconnected from your body during this time or find that you’re eating mindlessly. Sometimes we might be unaware that we are doing this and it could look like trying to “unwind” after a stressful day by relaxing and eating at the same time.

External eating style: High levels of external eating can be interpreted as our eating decisions being highly influenced by others or our surroundings. It can look like eating more at an event to connect with others over food rather than focusing on the conversations. It could also look like an increased intake of food because food is accessible or obvious and therefore is eaten more frequently because it is engaged with such as leaving nuts or biscuits on a jar on the bench in the kitchen or snacking on a platter at a party because you are positioned close to it. External eating can also look like walking past a bakery and buying food to connect with memories of people such as a bakery triggering a memory of a relative that makes a delicious brownie and wanting to buy a brownie because we think of this person as we walk past. External eating is more opportunistic rather than being connected to your body’s physical needs.