Are you an emotional eater?
The main reason why so many diets fail is that people don’t eat to satisfy hunger but turn to that specific diet or food to relieve stress. Unfortunately, after emotional eating one feels even worse. It’s a double trouble situation as not only the original stress remains with you, but also you feel guilty for overeating. Fortunately, there are practices that you can do to help you change the emotional habits that lead to sabotaging your diet.
What is emotional eating
Emotional eating also known as stress eating is using food to make yourself feel better. That is, eating food as a way of satisfying emotional needs rather than satisfying physical hunger. Emotional eating involves the slightest move of reaching for a pint of ice cream when you are feeling emotionally down, ordering a pizza when you are lonely or bored or pass by the drive-through after a stressful day at your workplace.
Using food as a reward isn’t necessarily a bad idea; however, when eating turns to be your primary mechanism of coping up with emotions, then getting stuck in an unhealthy cycle.
Whenever negative emotions drive you to overeat, you can take the following steps to break yourself free from the emotional eating habits. The following tips will help you take control of emotion-driven cravings.
Have a food diary
Use the food diary to note down what you eat, when you eat, and the quantity of food you eat. In the food diary, you can as well write down how you felt when you ate and how hungry you were. Through this, you can see a pattern that shows you the connection between your moods and food.
Keep up with the pleasure principle
Giving pleasure a priority in your life is an ideal way of breaking your emotional eating habits. Some of the ways you can pleasure yourself is: dressing comfortably, taking bubble baths and even flavoring your drinking water with fruit. These are another way for your body to feel good aside from eating.
Tame your emotions
If stress or depression causes you to eat, try out techniques that can help you tame the stress. These techniques fall under stress management and features practices such as meditation, yoga or deep breathing, EFT.
Avoid depriving yourself
When you are fighting to break off from emotional eating habits, you are likely to limit the calories intake. Through this, you are likely to increase your food cravings and back again to your habit. Try to eat enough amounts of healthier foods and ice it with an occasional treat to help you curb cravings.
Eat only when you are hungry
Surprisingly, emotional eaters will not eat when they are hungry, which results in wanting to eat a lot more later. That brings us to this question, “is your hunger emotional or physical?” Always ensure that the reason to eat is due to physical hunger. If you took food a few hours ago and your stomach is not rumbling, then you are probably not hungry. Try and give your food craving a time to pass.
Learn from drawbacks
Batting with emotional eating habits is sometimes not an easy task. If you have an experience of emotional eating, first forgive yourself and proceed fresh to the next day. Learn from the experience and come up with a plan on how you can prevent the same case from happening. Put your focus on the positive changes you are achieving in your eating habits.
Conclusion
Food will never be satisfying enough for emotional hunger. Yes, you may feel right at that moment; however, the feelings that triggered you to eat will still be there.
Regardless of how powerless you feel over food and your emotions, it is possible to make a positive change. The above ways will help you to deal with your feelings as well as learn how to eat mindfully. Remember, to seek professional help if you are unable to overcome emotional eating by using self-help options.
