Ep. 75 Is Your Teen Stress Eating? Here’s What to Do

Does your teen head to the pantry when they’re stressed, bored, or sad? You’re not alone. In this episode, Dr. Jenny Gourgari breaks down why emotional eating is common in teenagers, how puberty hormones (like cortisol, estrogen, and leptin) play a big role, and what parents can do to help without shaming or controlling.

You’ll learn:

• Why late-night snacking may be about feelings, not hunger
• How hormone shifts drive cravings
• The role of parental modeling in emotional eating
• Simple tools to help your teen develop better coping skills

🎧 Want to learn how to open up healthy conversations with your teen?
 Download my free guide:
 👉 15 Ways to Talk to Your Teen

Listen to these episodes for more:

• Ep 48: Understanding How Leptin Levels Change During Puberty
• Ep 55: How Puberty Hormones Affect Weight Gain in Teens

I’m Dr. Jenny Gourgari—pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine and a health coach.
After helping hundreds of teens struggling with their weight and hormones, I’ve created a whole new path by doing what most programs miss: balance puberty hormones naturally and create habits that actually last.

Here's what makes this different:
✅ No dieting. No calorie counting. No shame.
✅ No more food fights between parents and teens.
✅ No weight obsession—just healthy habits
✅ Real science behind how puberty hormones affect weight
✅ A safe, supportive approach that prevents eating disorders

Because when teens understand their hormones and get the right support, they don’t just lose weight—they gain strength, energy, confidence, and freedom!

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Transcript

Hello, welcome to another episode of The Lifestyle and we list for teens podcast. This is Dr. Jenny Cor, and on today's episode, I'm gonna talk about. How to support your teen when they're looking for food to satisfy their feelings. Let me tell you, what would you think if nighttime cravings, have nothing to do with real hunger, but they had to do with your efforts to try to regulate uncomfortable feelings?

Have you ever had that feeling of feeling sad and turning to food to feel better from time to time? We all have feelings like that and it's okay if it happens from time to time, but if it is a daily thing, then that can lead. To emotional eating all the time, and that can lead to an unhealthy weight.

So my goal for this episode today is to break down what are some of the reasons of emotional eating in teenagers and what are some of the healthier ways that parents can deal with it, and teenagers can approach that in a better way. So let me start by saying that puberty is a period that has a lot of emotional up and downs, and that has to do with a lot of hormones during.

Puberty that go up and down. So we know that cortisol is one hormone that is often elevated in teenagers when they're stressed with homework, stress with their routine. And high cortisol levels can lead to overeating because it's a way to decrease the stress and they. Can also at the same time, have more belly fat because of that.

Also, teenagers oftentimes stay up in late until the night because they have homework to do or they stayed up looking to their iPads or talking to their friends and instead of sleeping, they have high levels of cortisol when the levels should normally be low when they're sleeping. That abnormal cortisol level in teenagers can lead to overeating because their hormone is elevated.

Another hormone that is elevated in teenagers is estrogen in girls and testosterone in boys testosterone, we know that is associated with impulsive behavior and often teenager boys can go and eat without thinking because they are impulsive. This can be more exacerbated in kids that have a DHD and they're not managed very well with medications.

Or with teens that have a ADHD they are on medications that suppress their habitat during the day. And then when the medication effect wears off during the day and at night, they're hungry because they haven't eaten anything. On the other hand, estrogen in girls that is very high during puberty is also associated with moodiness and sadness.

And those feelings of moodiness and sadness due to high estrogen often make a lot of teenage girls turn to food. They wanna manage this sadness and this emotional discomfort . Another hormone that our body produces is called leptin, is coming from the Greek word lepto, which means thin.

And that is what gives our bodies the signal that we are. Full, and we are satisfied with what we ate and we stop eating. However, in puberty because of the puberty hormones, there is this phenomenon that is called leptin resistance, and what that means is that there are, even though the teenagers have high leptin levels.

They don't act, their body doesn't listen to those leptin hormones. So you can go and listen to a previous episode I have made about leptin in teenagers and how that can affect the body weight and their unhealthy behaviors. I believe it is episode 55, how puberty hormones affect weight gain in, teenagers. And there is another episode about leptin that is episode 48. So you can go and look for those episodes. Now another reason why teenagers turn to emotional eating is because oftentimes they model the behavior of their parents or the behavior of their friends. So if you are a parent that turns to food when you're stressed at work, when you're stressed with your daily routine, the teenager kind of.

Feels this is a normal reaction, especially if you talk also about it and say, oh, I feel stressed. Let me grab this cake to feel better, or actually going and grabbing a cake. Modeling the behavior of the parents. Another reason why the teenagers can turn to emotional eating during puberty.

Now the question is how can we help teenagers that have emotional eating overcome that? And how can you help teenagers get into a better. Way so that they don't turn to food when they feel stressed and anxious. One of the things that can help teenagers is to actually help them express their feelings in a healthier way. So opening the channels of communication with your teenager and asking them about what they're feeling, what upset them. And let them express. Let them pour out all those emotions and have a discussion and encourage them to talk about them with you, with their friends, with somebody that they trust.

So when you communicate your emotions, then you have less the need to turn into food to feel better in an effort to hide those emotions. Another thing that can help with emotional eating is actually labeling the emotion and writing it down in a journal. Sometimes the teenagers may wanna keep their life private, they might not wanna share with you, and that is okay, but.

Instead of bottling up all those emotions, you can encourage them to express them through other alternative ways like writing in a journal. They can listen to the music that is express them. They can also paint or do other creative activities that can help them channel

emotions if it is stress related. Particularly another technique that can help with emotional eating is deep breathing. So you can take one deep breath in, hold it for three seconds, and then have a prolonged expiration

so you can repeat that and take 10 deep breaths that can actually pause the cycle of stressful eating. Another thing that can help the teenagers and actually the whole family, is to make the environment better so that the teenagers don't have access to unhealthy options at the time when they're in this, crisis of emotional eating. So for example, if they go into the pantry and the pantry's full of chips and cake and chocolate and all those things it's gonna make it more difficult for them to resist those options. So having. Healthier alternatives where the teenagers can reach if they want something like they can have sparkling water.

They can have an orange, an apple, so they can still satisfy this in with meal, but it's like a healthier snack instead of turning into an unhealthier snack. Another thing that can help teenagers that turn to food because of emotional eating is to realize what is the trigger that leads them to the emotional eating.

So for example, if they have noticed that every Thursday afternoon they have to take exam or they have a math class. Or they are competitive athletes or there's something going on that they don't like to do, and they often, that's when they're more likely to go into unhealthy eating. Then they can anticipate that this event is gonna happen, and then they can take proactive action and you can help them organize that and take this proactive action during those times.

So to summarize, helpful tips that teenagers can do to avoid emotional eating is to try to find healthier coping skills to deal with those unhealthy emotions. They can try deep breathing, journaling, listening to music, doing other things to calm themselves. Down. Second thing is they can have healthier snack alternatives instead of unhealthy snack if they absolutely need to have something.

Number three is that parents can model healthy behavior on how. They themselves as parents, handle the emotions so that the teenager sees that actually it's possible when you're obsessed or when you're stressed, you can do some of these calming techniques. And finally identifying what are the triggers.

To emotional eating so that they can anticipate and be proactive about it in the future. If you wanted to learn more better ways to communicate healthy habits with your teenagers, you can go to lifestyle for teens.com/talk download resource I made on 15 ways to talk to your teenager and 75 real life examples and real life phrases that you can select.

You can use a couple of them and try to implement and see if that helps build up those communication channels between parents and teenagers. I hope this was helpful. If you're seeing this on YouTube, please don't forget to like and subscribe. I'll talk to you next week. Take care. Bye.