to eat one's feelings

1 8.6

To eat food to feel better when you are sad or stressed

idiom

Informal

: comer por ansiedad

I'm eating my feelings.

Examples

My dad took off, and, um, I started eating my feelings, and before I knew it, I was 5'5," 240.

Fat Camp (2017)
I suppose you could say I eat my feelings.

The Secret Kingdom (2023)
And then I go to the fridge, and I get a bunch of food, and I eat my feelings.

Not Cool (2014)
She eats her feelings.

Free Birds (2013)
After a tough day at work, I often find myself eating my feelings with a tub of ice cream.
When she felt overwhelmed, she turned to her favorite snacks, eating her feelings instead of facing her stress.
He admitted that he was eating his feelings whenever he felt sad and couldn't cope with his emotions.

Synonyms

to drown one's sorrows

vsto eat one's feelings

Informal

11 7.5

Try to forget sad feelings by eating or drinking alcohol

focuses on using food alone to cope with sadness rather than alcohol

How Comforting

to binge

12 4.5

to eat one's feelings

Informal

1 8.6

to snack

27 1.0

Surface Forms

eat one's feelings infinitive

ate one's feelings past

eaten one's feelings past participle

eating one's feelings present participle

eats one's feelings third person singular

Morphology

eat + one's + feeling

The constituents 'eat' and 'feelings' are used in a metaphorical/collocational way: it refers to using food to cope with emotions rather than literally consuming feelings. This mapping is somewhat inferable from the words and common cultural knowledge of 'emotional eating', but it is a metaphorical extension rather than fully compositional, so a B1 learner might guess it from context but would not reliably predict it from the parts alone.

Etymology

The idiom eat one's feelings may come from the image of someone opening the fridge and eating to hide or calm their strong feelings. So, it means 'to eat as a way to deal with sadness, stress, or anger'.