Emotional Eating During Perimenopause: Understanding It and Finding a Way Through
Emotional eating is common in perimenopause. Learn why hormone shifts drive it and practical, compassionate strategies to navigate your relationship with food.
When food becomes the coping strategy
You're not hungry, but you're standing in front of the fridge anyway. Or the afternoon anxiety peaks and you reach for biscuits before you've even registered the craving. Emotional eating during perimenopause is extremely common, and it makes complete sense when you understand what is happening in your body and brain. This is not about willpower or self-discipline. It is about a system under significant hormonal pressure finding the quickest available comfort.
Why perimenopause drives emotional eating
Estrogen and progesterone both influence serotonin, dopamine, and cortisol. As they fluctuate during perimenopause, mood becomes harder to regulate. Foods high in sugar and refined carbohydrates provide a rapid, temporary boost to serotonin and dopamine. Your brain learns this quickly and starts reaching for food as a mood regulation tool. Poor sleep, another common perimenopause companion, raises ghrelin, the hunger hormone, and lowers leptin, which signals fullness. The result is a body that is hormonally inclined toward comfort eating, particularly in the evenings.
Recognising the pattern without shame
The first step is simply noticing what is happening without layering guilt on top of it. Shame around eating tends to intensify the very behaviour it judges. Ask yourself whether hunger is physical or emotional. Physical hunger builds gradually and can be satisfied by any food. Emotional hunger tends to come on suddenly, craves specific comfort foods, and often comes with a sense of urgency or emotional charge. You do not have to eliminate emotional eating entirely. You just need to understand what it is doing for you. Even becoming aware that you are about to eat emotionally, without stopping it, builds the self-knowledge that eventually gives you more choice in the moment. Awareness precedes change, and it takes practice to develop without self-criticism getting in the way.
Addressing the underlying need
Emotional eating is always meeting a need. Common needs include comfort during anxiety, distraction from difficult emotions, reward at the end of a hard day, or stimulation when bored or restless. Once you can identify the need, you can start to experiment with other ways of meeting it. This is not about denying yourself food. It is about expanding your toolkit so that food is one option among several rather than the only one. A ten-minute walk, a warm drink, calling a friend, or a few minutes of breathing can sometimes meet the same need.
Practical strategies for the moments that matter
A pause before eating emotionally can create enough space to make a conscious choice. Set a timer for five minutes. If you still want the food after five minutes, eat it without guilt. Often the impulse softens in that window. Keeping the foods you tend to overeat less immediately accessible, and having satisfying alternatives within easy reach, also reduces the gap between impulse and action. Eating regular meals that include protein and fibre helps stabilise blood sugar throughout the day, which reduces the intensity of the emotional craving cycle.
Tracking mood and eating patterns together
One of the most useful things you can do is build awareness of when emotional eating happens. Using PeriPlan to log your symptoms and mood daily can help you spot correlations. You might find that emotional eating clusters around the days before your period, or spikes after poor sleep, or follows high-stress workdays. When you can see these patterns, they become less confusing and more manageable. You stop blaming yourself and start addressing the actual driver. This kind of data is also genuinely useful in a conversation with a dietitian, GP, or therapist. Rather than describing a vague sense that your eating feels out of control, you can show a concrete pattern that points toward a specific cause and a more targeted response.
When to seek more support
If emotional eating feels out of control, is causing significant distress, or has become the primary way you cope with difficult emotions, speaking to a therapist who specialises in eating behaviour is a good step. You do not need to have an eating disorder to benefit from this kind of support. Many women in perimenopause find that addressing emotional eating also opens up other important conversations about stress, identity, and the emotional weight of this life stage. You deserve real help, not just willpower advice.
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