Emotional eating within a clinical and community population
type: CreativeWork
description: Introduction: Emotional eating literature has focused on those with a clinical diagnosis around eating difficulties, exploring emotional eating in response to ‘negative’ emotions. Limited studies investigate the prevalence of emotional eating within community samples, and evidence appears inconclusive as to the underlying reasons why individuals emotionally eat. Aim: This research explores emotional eating within clinical and community samples. A clinically obese binge eating disordered population in study one, and a community sample during the coronavirus pandemic in study two. The aims were to explore experiences of emotional eating, comparing and contrasting across the two populations and in doing so, provide recommendations for therapeutic interventions. Method: In Study one, in-person focus groups and telephone individual interviews were conducted with a clinically obese binge eating disordered population (focus groups n = 8 female, n = 2 male; individual interviews n = 5 female) recruited via two national health service weight management centres. In study two, semi-structured online interviews using Microsoft Teams were carried out with eight participants (male n = 5; female n = 3) recruited following engagement with a previous emotional eating based study (see Ruiz et al., 2023), and via an opportunity and snowball sampling to explore emotional eating during the COVID-19 pandemic. Reflexive thematic analysis was employed as the approach to understand the experiences of participants whilst allowing for the researcher to engage in reflection throughout analysis. Findings: For the clinical population four main themes were generated: ‘An awareness of eating in response to emotions’ which reflects an initial lack of awareness of eating in response to emotions with a growing awareness and moment of insight into this phenomenon. ‘Emotions eliciting emotional eating’ reflects the participants experiences of individual emotions eliciting an eating response. ‘Factors p…
abstract: Introduction: Emotional eating literature has focused on those with a clinical diagnosis around eating difficulties, exploring emotional eating in response to ‘negative’ emotions. Limited studies investigate the prevalence of emotional eating within community samples, and evidence appears inconclusive as to the underlying reasons why individuals emotionally eat. Aim: This research explores emotional eating within clinical and community samples. A clinically obese binge eating disordered population in study one, and a community sample during the coronavirus pandemic in study two. The aims were to explore experiences of emotional eating, comparing and contrasting across the two populations and in doing so, provide recommendations for therapeutic interventions. Method: In Study one, in-person focus groups and telephone individual interviews were conducted with a clinically obese binge eating disordered population (focus groups n = 8 female, n = 2 male; individual interviews n = 5 female) recruited via two national health service weight management centres. In study two, semi-structured online interviews using Microsoft Teams were carried out with eight participants (male n = 5; female n = 3) recruited following engagement with a previous emotional eating based study (see Ruiz et al., 2023), and via an opportunity and snowball sampling to explore emotional eating during the COVID-19 pandemic. Reflexive thematic analysis was employed as the approach to understand the experiences of participants whilst allowing for the researcher to engage in reflection throughout analysis. Findings: For the clinical population four main themes were generated: ‘An awareness of eating in response to emotions’ which reflects an initial lack of awareness of eating in response to emotions with a growing awareness and moment of insight into this phenomenon. ‘Emotions eliciting emotional eating’ reflects the participants experiences of individual emotions eliciting an eating response. ‘Factors p…
author: Evans-Hall, Adam
keywords: emotional eating, thematic analysis, emotional regulation, binge eating disorder, coronavirus
license: https://wlv.openrepository.com/bitstreams/1961e852-7a5c-4122-9f2f-b08deb18a082/download
date published: 2025
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:10:39Z
provider: University of Wolverhampton
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Wolverhampton