Some people do not take emotional upsets (or even good moods) very well. Some react by losing their appetite or nervously pacing. Others may react by eating more than they need or eating foods that they ordinarily would not. Emotional eaters tend to go for foods that are salty, sweet, fatty, or just extremely high-calorie whenever they are very upset, angry, sad, or frustrated. They may also seek out these foods when they are stressed out, when they are bored, when they feel lonely, or fearful. They may have these emotions because of major life changes like the loss of a job, bills that they cannot pay, they may simply have them because they are really tired one day, or because of the bad weather.
No matter why they do it, emotional eaters tend to gain weight whenever they are under any kind of pressure because they simply do not stop to consider what they are putting into their mouths or how much.
There are several things that can be done for the emotional eaters, but the first key is to get the stress under control.
Alyssa is the epitome of an emotional eater. She starts eating whenever she is angry, sad, or lonely. She eats when things go wrong at work, she eats when her husband forgets to take out the trash and she has to do the mad dash to get the bags to the truck for the millionth time. If truth were to be told, Alyssa eats all of the time lately. As a result of her inability to deal with stress and emotional upheavals, she has gained thirty pounds. She knows that she needs to get better control of her food intake and her emotions and she needs to do so quickly. Her weight and increased levels of stress leaves her at higher risk for a number of different health conditions, including heart disease, high blood pressure, and some cancers.
To get started, Alyssa is going to work on knowing the difference between eating when she is hungry and when she is having an emotional eating moment. She will have to learn her stress triggers, including her husband’s inability to remember trash day. She will also use some other tactics to minimize the damages if she does have an emotional eating binge. After she identifies her stressors, she will use techniques to minimize their impact, like yoga, meditation, and breathing techniques.
Next, she will learn what real hunger feels like and find ways to categorize it by using a rating system that starts with a one for “just ate” to ten for starving. Her goal is to keep herself from getting to a seven on this rating. After she eats, she will assess how she feels again, from satisfied to stuffed, and try not to go to the extremes on this scale either. She will think about how long it has been since she ate anything at all and what she ate at that moment and then will think about the physical signs of hunger, including a rumbling stomach. If she cannot convince herself that she is actually hungry, she will get a glass of water (hunger is often mistaken for thirst,) and if that does not work, she will set a timer for ten minutes. If she still wants something after that ten minutes, she will have a small snack unless her next meal time is within an hour or so.
The suggestion to start and keep a food diary leaves Alyssa feeling more than a little shocked. She sees a pattern that makes things a little more clear – she eats at work around 10 am, although her hunger entry is not really that high but her mood is usually stressed or angry. This is right after the mid-morning meeting with the boss that she loathes – the one that takes credit for every one of her good ideas but blames her for every shortcoming in the division. She is also eating from the vending machine at 3 pm and getting more cans of soda than she had realized. For even more concrete proof of what she is eating and how much, she follows the advice of a friend and does not throw away any trash or clean up any dishes, instead putting everything into a bag that she must carry around with her. At the end of the evening, she is shocked that her bag is filled with trash and dishes.
Another of Alyssa’s major problems is the ease at which she can get food, especially salty or sweet junk foods. She buys the stuff in bulk and keeps it all easily accessible in her home. In her desk at work, there are candy bars and cookies, but she is a mere few steps to the vending machine as well. She learns to make better selections for snack food items at the store and to immediately break down bags of these snacks into smaller portions so that she is not tempted to eat straight from the bag. She also has moved all snack items, regardless of what they are, to either higher or lower shelves so that she has to work to get them. She is not depriving herself of any food item or food group, she just knows that if she wants a slice of cake for dinner, she will eat less for lunch. She is also using part of her lunch break at work to take a walk on sunny, warm days.
Emotional eaters need to have a strong support system in place so that they can deal with their emotional stress as well as their emotional eating. Because her husband is part of the problem, Alyssa enlists the help of her sister Cathy, who is ready to talk her out of her mallowmar stupor before it gets started. Because they live near enough to each other, they can meet for a walk in the park, a trip to the mall or other activities. On days where they cannot get away, they talk on the phone or on the computer until the urge to overeat has passed.
Breaking her meals up into well-spaced intervals keeps Alyssa from feeling hungry so that she is less likely to succumb to a growling tummy that convinces her to eat the first gooey, chewy, goody that she can get her hands on. Because she is never farther than three hours from a meal, she is never starving and can make better food choices. She is a person that likes to have everything planned out in advance, so she takes the time to plan out the next day’s meals and snacks, often while she is on the treadmill. That way she does not have to get something out of the vending machine at the last second or try to find something at a local fast food place. After a week of doing this, she realizes how much money she is saving each week and stops bringing money to work completely to further reduce her temptation to overeat.
One of her snack choices that she uses both at home and at work is a liquid protein supplement called Profect, from Protica. For 100 calories, each single serving of Profect gives Alyssa 25 grams of protein but zero carbohydrates and zero fat. There are a number of flavors so she can have a variety and a number of sizes which helps her to save money as well.
Protica Research (Protica, Inc.) specializes in the development of Capsulized Foods. Protica manufactures Profect, IsoMetric, Pediagro, Fruitasia and over 100 other brands, including Medicare-approved, whey protein supplements for bariatric surgery patients. You can learn more at Protica Research – Copyright