Semaglutide and Emotional Eating: A Science-Backed Guide to Breaking the Cycle

When stressed, depressed, or bored, it’s easy to find comfort in a favorite food. But that can easily turn into emotional eating, the habit of turning to food to cope with negative emotions. This often leads to consuming more calories, sodium, sugar, or fat than the body needs on a regular basis.

While emotional eating is a common coping mechanism and soothes uncomfortable emotions in the moment, it can make us feel worse in the long run. And feeling worse often means turning to food for comfort, creating a vicious cycle that’s hard to break.

Semaglutide, a popular weight loss drug, has disrupted this cycle for many. This medication suppresses appetite and can even decrease emotional food cravings. Here’s the science behind how this popular weight loss drug may help curb emotional eating, plus ways to maximize its impact.

Why Emotional Eating Doesn't Stop Overnight

Emotional eating is common, affecting 44.9% of people who are overweight or obese. This habit temporarily soothes sadness, boredom, and other negative feelings. In the long term, it can become deeply ingrained.

There are three reasons your brain may nudge you to snack when you feel emotional distress:

• Stress triggers appetite: When we’re chronically stressed or anxious, our body releases cortisol, a hormone that increases appetite, among other functions.
• Chronic stress can disrupt appetite regulation in the brain: Our brains are designed to receive hunger and satiety cues from the body and our environment, like a grumbling stomach or low blood sugar levels. If we experience chronic stress, our normal hunger and satiety mechanisms may be impaired, driving us to eat when we do not actually require more energy.
• Emotional eating provides a short-term dopamine hit: The reason we crave foods high in sodium, sugar, and/or fat is that they provide dopamine, a neurotransmitter that activates our internal reward system. This dopamine release temporarily soothes or numbs negative emotions.

The more we emotionally eat, the more our brain craves the dopamine hit, and the harder-wired the eating pattern becomes. The aftermath of overeating or binge eating can also make us feel stressed, alongside negative emotions such as guilt and shame.

When trying to overcome this habit, the advice to “just stop eating,” isn’t helpful because these neurological processes motivate someone to eat when uncomfortable feelings arise. Instead, someone has to address the psychological urges to emotionally eat, which semaglutide may help with over time.

How Semaglutide Targets Emotional Eating

Most of us have probably heard about how semaglutide helps with weight loss and type 2 diabetes management, but this weight loss drug also reduces emotional eating. In one study, 72.5% of participants reported that they emotionally ate before starting semaglutide. After three months on the medication, that dropped to 11.5%.

“Semaglutide is believed to dampen the ‘food noise’ that many people experience, or persistent thoughts about eating,” says Whitney Lisenmeyer, PhD, RD, an assistant professor of nutrition and dietetics at Saint Louis University and our medical reviewer, “Furthermore, it may weaken the power of those initially positive feelings one has with emotionally eating, thus disrupting a cycle of stress eating.”

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Reduced Appetite

Semaglutide is a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist, meaning it mimics the effects of GLP-1, a naturally occurring hormone which activates GLP-1 receptors that are found throughout the pancreas, gastrointestinal tract, and brain.

Whether naturally occurring or from semaglutide, GLP-1 activates these receptors after a meal, prompting blood sugar control and decreasing appetite. As a result, we feel less of an urge to eat than before. Plus, GLP-1 slows down the digestive process, so someone feels full for longer after a meal. Emotionally eating while full may feel physically uncomfortable, curbing the desire to do so.

Dopamine response to hyperpalatable foods

Receptors activated by GLP-1 play a role in regulating dopamine. When activated, these receptors decrease the amount of dopamine someone feels when eating a hyperpalatable food, a food that’s highly addictive due to a high concentration of sodium, salt, or fat. By reducing the dopamine released when eating these foods, semaglutide disrupts the “reward” they provide.

Food noise reduction

Many who emotionally eat report experiencing food noise, obsessive thoughts about food. This “noise” might look like fantasizing about dinner to the point where it interferes with your focus at work or an overpowering impulse to buy a favorite treat at the grocery store.

Food noise stems from disrupted hunger cues in the brain. Since semaglutide activates receptors in the brain responsible for hunger cues, those on this weight loss drug report fewer cravings for hyperpalatable foods and less food noise.

The Semaglutide Emotional Eating Timeline: What to Expect

Most studies on semaglutide measure results over the course of months or years because weight loss drugs don't work overnight. The good news? Appetite suppression is usually one of the first effects of semaglutide, meaning emotional eating may start to diminish within a few weeks of use.

Week 1-4: Early appetite suppression

As soon as someone takes semaglutide, the drug gets to work activating receptors that regulate appetite. The drug also slows down the digestive process, making someone feel full for longer. Combined, these two effects mean most people begin to experience appetite suppression in the first one to four weeks.

Month 2-3: Reduced binge urges

At the two to three month mark, GLP-1 continues to suppress appetite as well as curb food cravings or urges to binge eat. In fact, a clinical trial found GLP-1s reduce binge eating by 14 points on the 46-point binge eating scale within three months.

Month 4+: Sustainable habit formation

As someone continues to take semaglutide, the reduced appetite and fewer food cues make it easier to form healthier eating habits and find non-food related ways to cope with negative emotions. Plus, these medications should be taken alongside a healthy diet and regular exercise, two other habits that can help combat emotional eating.

7 Strategies to Maximize Semaglutide's Impact on Emotional Eating

While taking semaglutide reduces appetite and decreases emotion-driven hunger cues, the seven strategies below can fortify semaglutide’s impact on emotional eating.

Practice mindful eating

When we emotionally eat, we’re often eating mindlessly, not resting between bites or savoring our food. By slowing down, we eat in a more thoughtful way, increasing enjoyment and decreasing a desire to overeat.

Ways to practice mindful eating include:

• Putting utensils down between each bite
• Chewing food completely before eating another bite
• Focusing on how food tastes when eating
• Eating without distractions, such as TV or social media

Observe your triggers

Awareness is the first step to breaking emotional eating patterns. For a week, write down when the urge to emotionally eat pops up, noting the time of day, what you’re doing, and how you feel. This practice should reveal common internal and external cues that trigger emotional eating. Once you have a better idea of your triggers, make a plan to address or avoid them.

Develop healthier coping mechanisms

Emotional eating is often a coping mechanism for upsetting feelings, news, or events. Learning healthier coping mechanisms, either on your own or with guidance from a therapist, provides alternatives for when bad news or feelings arise.

Some healthier coping mechanisms include:

• Taking up a hobby to get your mind off the negative feelings, such as reading, knitting, or puzzling
• Walking to clear your head
• Journaling on your thoughts and feelings
• Talking to a friend about how you feel

Build a non-food reward system

Often, food is treated as a reward for good behavior, whether that’s getting through another work week or finishing a hard workout. While semaglutide reduces the dopamine hit from food rewards, having other rewards on hand can help avoid emotional eating. Non-food related rewards include:

• Taking a bubble bath
• Watching an episode of a favorite TV show
• Reading a book
• Playing with a pet
• Sleeping in
• Indulging in a favorite self-care activity
• Hanging out with a friend
• Attending a free local event
• Walking around the block in nice weather

Get enough sleep

Sleep deprivation impairs cognitive function, including the parts of the brain that control hunger cues. That means it’s normal to experience more food cravings when sleep-deprived. By getting seven to eight hours of sleep each night, your brain can better regulate appetite.

Plan ahead

If you know a stressful or busy week is coming up, plan ahead to stay on track with your eating habits. You might, for example, cook a few healthy meals on Sunday to have throughout the week. Or you could write out a meal plan so you’re not wondering what to cook after a late workday, stocking up on healthy ingredients for those meals and nutritious snacks.

Find healthier comfort foods

Even if you enact the six strategies above, cravings for comfort food may pop up from time to time. Healthier comfort foods can satisfy this craving without sacrificing weight loss goals. Ideally, these healthier comfort foods should still be something you can enjoy, such as a bowl of Greek yogurt with fruit or a handful of roasted nuts.

When Semaglutide Isn't Enough: Additional Support Options

While semaglutide helps many people overcome emotional eating, it isn’t the only option. Other medications and cognitive behavioral therapy can help as well.

Medication combinations

Currently, there is only one medication approved for binge eating: Lisdexamfetamine dimesylate (Vyvanse). Some mental health medications, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and antidepressants, may also help curb emotional eating since they address the feelings behind emotionally driven hunger cues.

Most of these medications require a prescription from a psychiatrist, who can effectively assess the mental health conditions behind unhealthy eating patterns and recommend the right medication.

CBT for binge eating

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a type of psychotherapy that focuses on challenging unhelpful thoughts or behaviors, can address a variety of coping mechanisms, including emotional eating. In one study, CBT helped 61% of people stop from binge eating entirely.

Unlike other medications, CBT can be used alongside semaglutide or as an alternative. In fact, GLP-1s often work better when taken in combination with behavioral therapy.