No significant correlations were found between emotional eating and attachment avoidance. The possible reason is their frequent practice of suppressing emotion may lead to less emotional awareness.

Emotional Eating and Avoidant Attachment

Higher levels of attachment anxiety are associated with emotional eating. Perhaps, attachment anxiety leads to a misinterpretation of internal cues, and individuals perceive hunger when they actually desire something attachment-related.

Emotional Eating and Anxious Attachment

Individuals with attachment insecurity have less interoceptive awareness and difficulty regulating emotion. Hence, Insecurely attached individuals may eat emotionally because they misinterpret internal hunger cues.

Pepperdine University

Comfort eating is eating as a way to soothe negative emotions. Research showed that eating sweet high-fat food can blunt the activity in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), a neuroendocrine system that in humans has been shown to regulate psychological processes, including negative emotions.

Comfort Eating(Emotional Eating)

Alexander, K. E., & Siegel, H. I. (2013). Perceived hunger mediates the relationship between attachment anxiety and emotional eating. Eating behaviors, 14(3), 374-377. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2013.02.005

Perceived hunger mediates the relationship between attachment anxiety and emotional eating

People respond to stress by increasing their intake of foods that are high in calories, fat, or sugar. According to American Psychological Association (2016), this is a common behavior, with approximately 39% of American adults reporting overeating or eating unhealthy foods because of stress.

Unhealthy Comfort Eating

People respond to stress by eating fruits and vegetables that contain natural sugars (e.g., fructose).

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