And then there’s the harder-to-pin-down issue of emotional eating, and a woman’s greater propensity for it. I can vouch for this from what I’ve seen on The Biggest Loser. On the show, most of the male contestants have become obese because of their off-the-charts portion sizes (and terrifically bad food choices on those big plates), while the women have found themselves in trouble because they steadily snack or binge to cope with stress, sadness or exhaustion. Could it be that women find it more difficult to curb their cravings and exhibit self-control than men? Perhaps, especially when it comes to food. According to a 2008 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, men are better able to handle self-control over food cravings than women are.
- From Time
ImaginingsIdeas
Mistake Number One: Taking a lesson on gender differences from an unethical diet show edited for story arc and broadest appeal: The Biggest Loser.
Mistake Number Two: Assuming you can measure ‘emotional’ based on whether some food has been eaten from a plate, or taken straight out of the fridge at midnight and licked off manicured fingers.
Mistake Number Three: Making some pretty huge gender assumptions, in 2012, based on a single study with only 23 subjects, conducted back in 2008, whose abstract is appropriately moderate: ‘the brain mechanism(s) underlying voluntary control of hunger are not well understood’.
- Also THIS HAPPENED RECENTLY. And now Hilary Clinton cops it again. (Except she’s damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t.)
- Good Men Project says It’s Time We Paid Attention To Binge Eating In Men.
- IT’S EVERYWHERE, DUDE. Women Wake Up Grumpier.
- Ladies Be Moody.
- When women are believed to be more emotional there are real and significant impacts on her health care, as outlined in this review of the movie Side Effects at Bitch Flicks
- Is there a penalty for powerful women admitting to mental illness? from Frisky
- “I never realized the gender dichotomy of cancer culture until today. Culture surrounding men’s cancer is primarily about prevention and treatment, while women’s cancer culture focuses on emotions and attempting to conform to the social standards held for women (looking pretty and “feminine”)…” – Jolie, a 21-year-old diagnosed with cancer
It is quite a gender-biased statement, but now that I think about it… it applies to me and my male partner. When he eats dinner he will have a huge portion of food, and mine will be normal sized, but then I’ll be feeling bored afterwards so will have chips / desserts / snacks while he’s happy with just breakfast and dinner meals and no snacking. I’ll eat because I’m bored, lonely or sad or whatever but if he’s feeling that way he’ll go for a walk.
This is quite true for us (we’re not obese, however, like the people in Biggest Loser) and for other women and men that I know. In fact, for most. It’s easy to point at it and say ‘gender biased’ but then when I looked at myself and my friends it was quite true.
Hi Jess,
Thanks for the comment. I’m pretty sure that Time article exists mainly to generate comment and page views, and for that it’s worthy.
I’m not going to question that it’s true for you and the people you know who happen to fit this statement. I think there’s way more to it though, than ‘women are emotional eaters’ whereas ‘men just eat a lot’. It reminds of of ‘women are emotional at work’ and ‘men just get angry’, without the acknowledgement that anger can simply be a different outworking of exactly the same inner emotion, even though women are more likely to shed tears (angrily).
Similarly, cultural conditioning must be at play with eating behaviour, because it’s far more socially acceptable for men to eat a heaped plate of food in company than women. I’m also thinking of real life examples, recalling women who’ll take something off a communal plate and break it in half… before going back and eating the other half later, because it looks more dainty if you do it like that. I don’t recall seeing a man doing that same thing. Also, I doubt women would be going back to raid the fridge after dinner if they’d eaten a huge plate of food during the meal, because they’d be feeling too full.
I also take issue with the assumption that eating a big plate of food is *not* emotional. It most definitely can be, even if it happens in front of others, at designated meal time.
Oops, sorry I just left a second comment then realised you’d replied!
I think you’re right indeed. I didn’t even think of these things first time but there are always reasons that underlay any behaviour. I looked a little deeper, though, in my second comment. I was just outside and thought back on my answer and realised I had more to think about and say than I did here originally.
Thanks for replying and giving me some more things to think about!
Ha ha, yes I think we can basically agree there, and I really like your point about women having less privilege in certain subcultures (if not all?) so therefore (increasingly cheap) junk food is one of the few pleasures of their day. I remember working in retail when I was younger, getting a ten minute break every three and a half hours working non-stop on the checkout, and I remember REALLY looking forward to food during that ten minute break, because there really was nothing else to look forward to except going to the toilet which, incidentally, also had to happen during that ten minutes. I’m not suggesting that men aren’t also working really mundane jobs around the world. I’m deliberately choosing ‘mundane’ here and not ‘boring’, because I think there is a difference — ‘mundane’ work tends to be low-level stuff which nevertheless requires brain engagement, unlike digging ditches or coal-mining, which is probably ‘boring’ but also quite social… A topic for another post perhaps. Taking that supermarket job as an example, the girls were channeled into checkout jobs because we were ‘better with the customers’ (more pliable I guess) and the boys were given shelf-stacking, which they did in groups. (Looking back I’ve had lots of regrets about not asking to be a shelf stacker. I had a lot of life lessons as a ‘checkout chick’, but I would’ve much rather stacked shelves…) Back to the original article, the boys were just as likely to eat a lot during *their* ten minute breaks, but any onlooker would’ve said it was because they’d worked up a healthy appetite stacking shelves. In fact, it may have been just as much about reward. I’m not sure where ‘emotional’ stops and ‘self-gratification’ begins — not when it comes to food.
All this has me thinking about the research I did early last year before giving up sugar. (I needed to find out how to do it, worried that I wouldn’t be able to.) I remember listening to a radio interview with an Australian guy who has written a book called Sweet Poison. David Gillespie isn’t a doctor — he’s a lawyer and dad who gave up sugar himself some years ago, and has since done a lot of research into the subject. He mentioned in the interview that once men give up sugar they tend to lose their taste for it very soon afterwards. Women tend to get a monthly reminder around the time of menstruation, but sugar and carbohydrate cravings subside for women, too, after some months going sugar-free. I can say from personal experience that this was true for me. To me it’s obvious: this kind of eating is hormonal in origin and the more I hear about personal experiences of giving up sugar and processed foods, the more I’m convinced that Society (Dr Phil, dietitians etc) are giving too much weight to psychological issues and not enough weight to plain old biochemistry.
So in a sense I will admit that women eat differently from men. But I can’t understand why it’s okay to attribute female appetite to ‘emotion’, and male eating to ‘need’ (or lack thereof) when in fact *everyone’s* entire appetite is controlled by hormones (most notably ghrelin, leptin and insulin).
Now that I’ve responded to your comments I can see what my real point is. I want us all to veer away the entire concept of ‘emotional’ eating, and regard it more simply as biochemical differences. Because, apart from my feminist angle, until more people understand the role of hormones, it’s impossible to fix bad eating habits. If women are constantly given the message that eating is something we can do when we’re emotional, it’s easy to throw up our hands and submit to the stereotype.
I’ve heard some integrative nutritionists talk about their success with alcoholic clients after realising that alcohol abuse is simply a different outworking of carbohydrate addiction. (They find that giving up processed carbohydrates concurrently with alcohol sees better results.) This is an interesting point because here in Australia, binge drinking is a big problem, especially among youth, whether male or female, but I’m guessing that for certain subcultures of men, drinking an entire goonbag is more socially acceptable than eating twelve cream eggs back to back.
Sorry, I know I already left a comment haha but I just had something else to say because it’s interesting.
One way to look at this and certainly from a man’s point of view is to come back to the old argument that women are ‘hysterical’. “Look at ‘em, can’t control themselves! Look at ‘em running on their emotions! Whereas I (the man) just like eating. No feelings attached. ”
It makes women seem out of control, and like over-emotional messes who can’t even sort out their eating habits.
The other way to look at this and how I am going to, is to say perhaps women use food to feel better because they don’t have anything else in their lives to do that. The chocolate bar is the only luxury and pleasure they’ll get that day. That packet of crisps is the only thing keeping them focused and stopping them from cracking. Perhaps women emotionally eat to stifle feelings and to hide rather than to fuel hysterical emotions, and to simply have a little something to look forward to that day since nothing else will make them happy in their current situations.