It is a certainty that emotions can make us do what we ought
not do—in this case overeating and stuffing, being a binge eater, compulsively snacking, or all three. But when you ask yourself what made you overeat or stuff or binge or snack, you most likely won’t come up with the real answer.

That’s because emotions persist even though the memory of what produced the emotions is forgotten.

In a recent study on patients with amnesia, the amnesia patients held on to the emotion but forgot the circumstance that made them feel emotional. What actually happened in the research was that patients were shown sad film clips. Afterward, the patients experienced sadness but could not remember the cause of their sadness. The same result occurred when the film clips were happy ones. The experimenters concluded, “These findings provide direct evidence that a feeling of emotion can endure beyond the conscious recollection for the events that initially triggered the emotion.”

So when you automatically eat because of feeling this way or that, all you have to go on when you look back is the feeling and not the chain of events that made you feel this way. This is one reason it is hard to break yourself of emotional eating. If you don’t know what caused you to feel like you do, then what can you do about what you are feeling?