Quiz: What's your eating style?

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Scoring:
Add up the "true" answers you gave for the preceding questions, and read the interpretations corresponding to your answers:

Note: There are no right or wrong answers to this quiz. It is designed to help you better understand your eating style. Understanding yourself is always an important step in making desired behaviour changes. Many people find that they exhibit more than one emotional eating style; some people exhibit all five styles. After scoring your quiz, read the information related to every emotional eating style relevant to you.

If you answered "True" to 3 or more of Questions 1 through 5, you are a Binge Eater.

If you answered "True" to 3 or more of Questions 6 through 10, you are a Mood Eater.

If you answered "True" to 3 or more of Questions 11 through 15, you are a Self-Esteem Eater.

If you answered "True" to 3 or more of Questions 16 through 20, you are a Stress Eater.

If you answered "True" to 3 or more of Questions 21 through 25, you are a Snowball Effect Eater.

The five emotional eating styles
Did you find yourself falling into more than one eating style? Many people do. After all, we're multidimensional creatures that don't fit into a single pigeonhole. We are complex blends of our past experiences, present situations, heredity, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviours. We evolve and change, usually driven by desires to improve ourselves, and sometimes thwarted by life's roadblocks. All these factors influence our eating styles, and what holds true for you today may be entirely different one year from now.

Although there are 31 different possibilities (made up of various blends of the five main styles) of the categories described below, they are still too simplistic to fully capture the intricacies of emotional overeating. Yet, these 31 eating styles are about 30 more descriptions than in most diet books I've picked up.

In the typical diet book, we get pat answers and one-size-fits-all prescriptions. I used to feel perplexed by diet doctors' advice, such as, "If you're feeling upset, stay out of the kitchen." No other mention of, or suggestions about, emotional overeating exists in most of these books!

When my book, The Yo-Yo Syndrome Diet: Why Your Weight Goes Up and Down, and How to Keep It Down for Good, was first published in 1989, it was considered radical! Three-fourths of the book was devoted to the subject of emotional overeating, and traditional diet advice only comprised a minor part of the book. Today, it's accepted as common knowledge that emotions play a role in overeating and unhealthful eating.

With that information in mind, here are the five core emotional eating styles:

1. The Binge Eater
This is a very black-and-white eating style -- you either are a Binge Eater or you're not. Those who are Binge Eaters will instantly recognize this description. Those who aren't Binge Eaters will think this is an outlandish description.

Certain foods trigger overeating in Binge Eaters. Those foods are often referred to as "binge foods." Binge foods commonly are made from refined white flour or sugar -- foods such as sweets, pastas, and breads. Different theories have tried to explain the binge-food phenomenon. Some experts believe Binge Eaters become anxious as a result of blood sugar fluctuations triggered by eating high-glucose foods. This anxiety leads to a cycle of binge-eating to relieve the condition.

Many Binge Eaters find that the only way to keep their appetite under control is by avoiding their binge food altogether. This is also a useful therapeutic approach, because often the binge food keeps a lid on the person's underlying emotional issues. When the binge food is removed from their availability, the emotions are free to come forward for resolution. Binge Eaters benefit from interpreting their cravings for the binge food, using the methods in this book.

Click here for 8 tips to avoid overeating.

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