Often, emotional eating is, “a sign that something in them needs attention and soothing,” Harrison points out. That’s obvious when you think about it — but most of us don’t stop and think about it when we find ourselves plowing through a family-size bag of corn chips. We just freak out about the corn chips. And once you’re stuck in the corn-chip freakout, the actual issue gets pushed out of focus. “People often express so much shame around the behavior, but I try to help them see that eating may have met their emotional needs in many ways, and that maybe, at the time, it was the best coping mechanism they had,” adds Harrison. “So [I urge them] to have some compassion for that, even as they try to reduce their reliance on the behavior."

Then, there’s the other type of emotional eating: the happy kind. “There are plenty of foods we eat in order to connect and bond with others, not purely for hunger or nutritional needs,” says Harrison. Birthday cake is the classic example. There’s no biological necessity for birthday cake, but it still serves a purpose in our lives. Then, there are things like your mom’s roast chicken that tastes like home, or the tomato soup you crave whenever you have a cold. We tend to disparage comfort food, but the fact is that food can sometimes be comforting — and comfort is a legitimate need, too.

Complicating things further is the fact that a lot emotional eating isn’t 100% emotional. “In my practice, I see a lot of clients who consider themselves emotional eaters, but once we look into their eating patterns it becomes clear that the ‘emotional’ eating episodes are at least partly driven by hunger,” says Harrison. “I also often see people who deny, ignore, or don't feel their hunger for long stretches of time, and they may feel that they're eating purely in response to emotions — but actually, sometimes their low blood sugar is manifesting as sadness or anxiety.” It’s also important to remember that being hungry can intensify an existing feeling. So, if you’re already in an anxious state, then hunger joins the party, you might suddenly find yourself frantically shoving a burrito in your face. Because you feel like an emotional wreck, you could easily call this an “emotional eating episode.” But on any other day, you'd just call it “lunch.”

And if it is purely emotional, that’s no reason to beat yourself up (when has that ever made anything better?). It’s simply important to ask yourself if there was any hunger in the mix before identifying this as a case of emotional eating. “Most of the time, the behavior declines or disappears with greater awareness of physical needs,” says Harrison. But don’t forget: Eating to satisfy your physical needs and your personal desire — no matter what the source — is part of taking care of yourself. And there is nothing inherently disordered about that.