Emotional Eating Quotient may help explain overeating

It stands for “emotional eating quotient.” It can explain why it makes you overeat — and the secret to managing it so you can lose weight.

Did you buy six boxes of Girl Scout cookies this year because you couldn’t say no to the world’s cutest 7-year-old in a Brownie uniform? Did you take that extra helping of your sister-in-law’s wholewheat carob cake because you didn’t want to hurt her feelings?

If you could answer yes to these questions, you may suffer from sociotropy — the scientific term for having the need to please others. Excessive niceness is a recipe for ex- cessive girth. We all know the major triggers of emotional eating: anger, loneliness, rejection, guilt. Most of us, at one time or another, have taken out our fury on a bag of corn chips or tried to beat the blues with cookie-dough ice cream. But new research shows that certain personality types also are prone to making a frosted doughnut a chosen alternative to therapy.

In a recent experiment at Case Western Reserve University, researchers screened volunteers for their “gotta be nice” qualities, then invited them to a meeting with a staff member (actually an actor) who casually passed around a bowl of M&Ms. When the bowl came their way, students who’d scored higher on the sociotropy scale dug in, taking more than the students who were less concerned with others’ comfort. “They didn’t want him to feel bad by eating fewer,” explains study head Julie Exline, Ph.D.

After overeating comes depression. “When your motivation is to please other people, you’re letting them tell you what’s important to you,” says Exline. “I describe it as ‘silencing your own voice.’” The goal, then, to avoid piling on those unpleasing pounds, is to find that voice.