One of the biggest obstacle to weight loss for many people is emotional eating.
Emotional eating affects more people than you may realize and it varies greatly to what extent they are affected. Some individuals deal with it occasionally and others struggle with it daily. The big positive is that emotional eating is a learned behavior and that means we can unlearn it with the right tool, patience and support. No matter how out of control you may feel your eating is right now when it comes to emotions and food, you have the ability to unlearn it with a little time and effort and kick it to the curb for good. Won’t that be nice.
When you overcome emotional eating you will no longer be at the mercy of your emotions and derailed from your weight loss efforts. You will be able to deal with feelings and stress that normally send you to the candy machine or fast food restaurant. It is an incredibly freeing experience and once you understand how to do it, it becomes easier and easier each time. So how do we start to overcome emotional eating that leads to overeating and often an eating binge?
The first step is you want to do is to start to observe your eating patterns. It can be difficult when you first begin this because you often find that your emotions and thoughts are triggering your “need” or want for food.
We crave certain foods when these feelings, emotions and stresses occur because they effect our pleasure center in our brain and the food becomes an instant distraction and you avoid the feeling that was triggered. It could be as simple as a comment from your spouse or the stress of getting your kids off to school in the morning that triggers your emotional eating reaction.
Taking the time to start observing and to journal when, what and why you are eating can really be the beginning to turning the emotional hunger switch off. If you start to observe yourself and your patterns, you can then start to work on new behaviors to put these in place instead of eating. When you learn to resist the food and replace the it with a new one your brain will start to process the information differently and instead of calming yourself with food it will start to substitute in the other behavior using it to give your body the time to calm itself without the use of food.
Just observe yourself and what you are feeling. Keep the journal for the first week or two and start to get an understanding of what is triggering you. Next, think of one to five healthier behaviors you can do to substitute for eating. Like taking a walk, a nap, reading a book, going outside for some fresh air, calling a friend or family member, you get the picture. Just pick things you enjoy and will give your body and mind something to do other than eat. You want to disrupt the learned habit of eating for distraction and to engage the pleasure center in the brain with food. After about a week of observing and journal you can start to substitute the healthier behaviors.
Action Step: Observe, what you eat and when you eat and write it in your journal. If you know what is pushing you towards food then write it down, but if you don’t that’s OK too. Sometimes things aren’t as obvious as we think and it may take a while, even days before we figure out what’s bothering us.
So, for now just write down what you observe. Make a list of things you can do that would make you feel better that are unrelated to food. When we emotionally eat we often do so not only to avoid certain feelings that make us uncomfortable but to calm ourselves down both physically and mentally.
Think of some things you can do in place of eating. When I did this exercise I found that I usually was upset about something as well as tired. I thought if I could just lay down for ten or fifteen minutes it would help. I would never give myself permission to do that so I ate instead. Once I did give myself permission I found that I was able to calm down and re-energize in a way that did not include food and it worked almost immediately.
I found the first day I tried this I went to lay down or sat quietly 3 or 4 tomes throughout the day for 10 minutes. I did some deep breathing as well. I never would have thought it would have worked so well but it did.
I did research and I found that this method was in line with how our brain works and how our body responds to stress. So keep and open mind and just start with these 2 actions steps. Remember don’t expect perfection just start a small, slight shift and look for small progress. Soon you will be able to resist these urges and feel great about doing it.
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