How To Stop Emotional Eating

As anyone who’s watching their weight will tell you, hunger is just one of many reasons that people eat. Those with a tendency toward emotional eating are especially vulnerable to making poor diet choices for reasons outlined in this article. If you’re an emotional eater, you may find yourself eating to deal with uncomfortable emotions, using food as a reward when you’re happy, and craving sweets or unhealthy snacks when stressed. (Don’t worry; you’re not alone!) The following ideas can help you to cut down emotional eating and develop healthier eating habits—even when stressed!

Find Relaxation Techniques



When you’re under stress, your body is likely producing higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that tends to make people crave sweet and salty food—the stuff that’s generally not good for us. If you’re experiencing stress on a regular basis and aren’t finding ways to relax your body relatively quickly, cortisol could be creating these cravings, as well as contributing to other health problems. The following stress relievers for busy people can help, or you can find stress relievers that fit with your specific situation with the Stress Reliever Personality Tool.

Cope In Healthy Ways
Many people use food to deal with uncomfortable emotions like anger, frustration, fear, and other feelings. While we need food for survival, there are healthier ways to cope with emotions:

• Talk To A Friend. Social support can go a long way toward helping you process your feelings, gain support if needed, and move on. (Just don’t meet your friend at The Cheesecake Factory!)

• Try Journaling. Processing one’s feelings in a journal has been found to have many health benefits beyond mere stress management. When you feel like reaching for unhealthy food, reach for a pen instead.

• Exercise. Getting your body moving is a great way to blow off steam and get your endorphins going, and is a much healthier option than overeating.

Face Your Problems



If you’re using food to muffle your feelings in a difficult relationship, try assertiveness instead. If food is your only treat at a job you hate, try techniques for finding satisfaction at your job, or get a different one. Cut down on the stress in your life and you won’t need food to help you cope.

Try Healthy Alternatives



If these techniques don’t completely eliminate your emotional eating urges, go ahead and indulge—but use healthier fare. Drink Perrier instead of soda; munch on veggies or healthy snacks instead of chips; savor one small piece of dark chocolate instead of binging on a whole chocolate muffin from the coffee shop (it’ll help you live longer!). All of these things can be good for you, so you’ll still come out ahead without feeling completely deprived.

source:
- stress.about.com

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How To Stop Overeating

If you are always wondering how to stop overeating, there is one thing that needs to happen. You need to signal your body that it is satiated.

Here’s the key for how to stop overeating: When you consistently eat healthy fats, such as coconut oil, you provide vital nutrition to your body. But beyond that, you trigger a powerful mechanism that is key to success in weight loss: satiation.

When you eat healthy fats, your body actually produces a hormone in the stomach as a signal that you’ve eaten enough. It’s our body’s natural mechanism that tells you to stop eating.

Yes, you could ignore it, but when you feel satiated, you are much less likely to overeat. Cravings, and the persistent hunger that you experience in most diets disappear. Many health problems resolve themselves as well, and you have more energy, and simply a much more hopeful attitude toward life.

Satiation is truly the key for how to stop overeating. By feeding your body the healthy food, nutrients and fats that it needs, you won’t feel hungry and you won’t want to fill up or overeat on empty calories.

Remember, you can never get enough of what you don’t need. If you are an emotional eater, then you’ll need to work on managing emotions too. But if your body is physiologically satisfied, and you aren’t constantly denying yourself and warding off hunger, then that will be easier to do.

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Psychology Of Eating

It’s time for the psychology of eating. After all, you’ve tried all the diets. You’ve counted calories, carbohydrates and fat grams.

You’ve studied every food combination ever invented and used your own body as a laboratory. They work—temporarily.

They may even work for months at a time and you think you’ve finally licked it. You have found the answer. But then slowly… insidiously… you start to regain. The pounds creep back on. You do what the books tell you to do. You try to lose it again right away, but you feel it slipping away.

This is the psychology of eating at work.

You can’t believe this is happening again. And you can’t seem to apply the right formula. What worked before like magic doesn’t seem to respond the same way. How could this be?

You feel out of control and helpless over your own impulses. Your own body seems to have turned against you. So you start turning against yourself.

The Psychology Of Eating Problem

Diets don’t work for many reasons, at least not for long. One reason is because diets are based on deprivation, and depriving yourself creates stress and tension—an internal battle. Your energy is focused on controlling what you can and cannot have, rather than giving yourself and enjoying what you really want.

The psychology of eating works every time. If you deprive yourself, it makes you want it more. You have just created the “forbidden fruit.”

Setting up an internal battle is not the best way to solve a problem. Do you know how much time and energy it takes to be constantly fighting with your own impulses?

Willpower eventually erodes, and even if you win the battle, you almost always lose the war because self-respect and trust in yourself are compromised.

Some psychology is paradoxical, and this certainly exists in the psychology of eating. When you stop trying so hard to lose weight, that’s when you are most likely to lose. But you have to truly let go—like the Buddhist concept of not being attached to a particular outcome or result.

My own experience with the psychology of eating is probably typical. As soon as I even start to think about dieting or losing weight, I get hungry and start craving foods that would be on no one’s diet. Call it an oppositional streak or a midlife crisis, but I’m just not willing to fight with myself anymore.

Letting go can be a scary proposition. We’re not exactly experts at trusting ourselves. TV commercials even tell us that we need a pill to distinguish love from lasagna. With every diet that “fails”, we mount evidence to convince ourselves that we are not trustworthy. Could it be possible that it is the diet, rather than us, that is not trustworthy?

One way to stop trying so hard is to shift your focus from losing weight to truly experiencing and enjoying food using mindful awareness. It may be scary at first and you may worry about your self-control. But if you can make this one shift, you will automatically grant yourself a life upgrade. You will have a much better chance of actually losing weight and being free of these “weight battles” forever. (Excerpt from Lose Weight Now Stay Slim Forever)

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Comfort Eating

We might as well face it, comfort eating is at an all-time high. Our lives get more and more hectic all the time. It seems like ever since 9/11, there has been a lot written about comforting ourselves and calming our fears.

One of the biggest reasons people overeat is for self-soothing.

When stress and uncertainty increase, we turn to what we know, especially if it has associations of a simpler and safer time in our lives.

In a crisis, we call friends and family members. Just the sound of a loved one’s voice can be soothing. In the everyday crises of our lives, it’s easy to come home after a long day of putting out fires and turn to something we know – comfort eating.

Unfortunately, the ultimate comfort eating foods are often loaded with carbohydrates and fat – macaroni and cheese, chocolate chip cookies, etc. They’re quick to fix (or grab) and boy, do they go down easy.

And somewhere in the back of your memory, they invoke glimpses of another time – perhaps for a brief moment, you are back in the warm comfort of your mom’s kitchen on a winter day.

Not that there’s anything wrong with comfort food. It can be a great soother. The backlash comes when it becomes the primary way you know to soothe your frazzled nerves.

And if you continue to use comfort eating to comfort, the pounds keep adding on and then you need more comforting because of the distress the extra weight has caused!

You have just created a vicious cycle.

To manage things more effectively, don’t ban comfort foods altogether, but bring more awareness to when and how you comfort yourself.

Have a range of comforts available to you, so that you feel like you have a choice. You may be in the habit of grabbing food on the way or as soon as you walk in the door.

Try to break that habit by developing a new habit.

Do something totally different – it doesn’t matter what it is (drink a glass of ice water, stand on your head, etc.) as long as it is completely different from your usual routine.

Make a list of activities that comfort you and start doing them on a regular basis. That will help you build a new habit of using other ways to soothe yourself besides eating.

It can be ever so small. Call a friend. Stand up and stretch. Take a few deep breaths.

Small things can make a big difference.

Be creative when you make your list. Brainstorm. Write down everything you can think of whether it’s practical or not.

Identify those times of the day that are most difficult for you and have your list handy. Transition times can be troublesome, such as transitioning from work to home, or home to work, and that pesky mid-afternoon time when your energy needs a boost.

Our lives are busy and often difficult. You are going to need comfort, so be proactive and figure out how to give it to yourself often in a healthy way.

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Stress Eating Is NOT The Problem

I can’t tell you how many posts I have read with statements like “I am gaining weight because I am stress eating!”

Many people seem to have an awareness that something is driving them to eat, and it’s easy to focus on that as the problem.

Stress eating itself is NOT the problem. It is whatever is driving you to turn to a drug, like food in the first place. When you are done eating the cookies, what drove you to the cookies in the first place is still there.

The major task to avoid stress eating and it’s accompanying vicious cycle of weight gain is this – how do you face what you don’t want to face without food?

How do you accept what you don’t want to accept without numbing out the feelings, or simply distracting yourself with food . . . and then obsessing over why you are gaining weight?

Imagine being able to accept any feeling that comes along. Imagine not scaring yourself with your own thoughts, so much so that you go running off to the refrigerator to ease the pain, or at least not have to think about it for the brief moment of chocolate passion. So much so that you feel the need to go unconscious.

Imagine accepting your life as it is, embracing every chaotic moment that wasn’t supposed to be this way, celebrating every bit of imperfection that you find in everyday life. Fully inhabiting your life, as it is. Being with it, being in it. “Being with” every feeling, as you celebrate the gift of waking up every day.

Imagine accepting and loving your life as it is, instead of constantly searching and pining for what you think it should have been.

When you live in the present, there is no stress. Therefore there is no stress eating. Food doesn’t run your life, and your life doesn’t get organized around food and weight issues. You can actually focus on and enjoy what’s important.

Yes, you still may need to make some changes in your life. You may need to learn to tolerate those feelings that send you to the fridge. You may need to accept things in your life that you can’t control, aspects of your life that turned out differently than you thought.

But life is a lot sweeter when you actually stay awake for it . . .

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Stress Eating: 3 Ways To Stop

Eating is all too often a rushed, mindless, automatic and mechanical hand-to-mouth activity.

We are in a sense, eating zombies!

Fortunately, we can be awakened and reprogrammed to actually start and stop eating when we are actually hungry.

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Emotional Eating Is Not The Problem!
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Let’s be honest – everyone engages in emotional eating at some time or another. That’s because the definition of emotional eating is eating any time that you are not hungry.Eating to soothe as a coping strategy – it’s easier than facing the stress and uncertainty of a job or relationship issue day in and day out.

Emotional overeating and stuffing yourself well beyond the point of fullness on a regular basis ARE problems.

And these habits WILL affect your weight.

Simply overeating is not the problem either – who hasn’t stuffed themselves on Thanksgiving or some other holiday in the name of celebration?

Face it – we eat for pleasure and we eat to cope.

Engaging in this behavior occasionally is not a problem (so stop being so hard on yourself)! It’s when it becomes a mindless habit, a “program” that problems (and pounds) start to mount up.

Here are 3 ways to help:

1. To become more mindful about what you are doing, try this experiment. Plan an entire day where you eat ONLY when you are hungry, and ONLY until the hunger signals go away.

Then plan an entire day when you eat ONLY when you are triggered by stress and emotion (anger, boredom, fatigue, happiness, etc.)

Notice the difference!

2. Think about why you eat (or overeat). Basically, we eat either to satisfy physical or emotional hunger. Notice during the day which hunger you are responding to.

Are you physically hungry?

Or

Are you eating to cope?

3. What if mindfulness could have the force of habit behind it instead of mindlessness?

During the week, notice how and where you eat.

If you eat a lot of meals standing near the microwave, try sitting instead.

If you eat in front of the TV, try the kitchen table with soft music.

If you always eat indoors, try taking the meal outside.

Any small change can be a doorway to mindfulness.

Food for thought, for sure . . .

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Why Self-Discipline Is Overrated

If there is one trait that is valued in every society, it may well be self discipline. Teachers and parents alike value it in children, and you would be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t want to be more self disciplined in some area of their lives.

Self discipline is that ability to marshal one’s willpower to delay immediate gratification, and to persevere in order to accomplish things that are desirable.

In Psychology, of course, one can never win. Those who are undercontrolled are seen as impulsive and distractible. Those who are overcontrolled are seen as rigid, compulsive and joyless. The first is seen as more of a “problem.”

The funny thing is – on the VIA Test of Signature Strengths, almost NO ONE scores high on the strength of Self Regulation. Although we aspire to have more self discipline, it is universally one of the lowest strengths.

Low self control, however, is not always bad; in fact, it is the basis of spontaneity, flexibility (the hallmark of mental health), expressions of personal warmth and creativity.

The Downside of Self Discipline

High self control is not always a good thing. It seems to go hand in hand with less spontaneity, which can spoil not only the fun, but also the savorings of life. A preoccupation with self control is also a key feature of anorexia. It can be a sign of vulnerability, and people so afflicted may suffer so much from a fear of being out of control that they are constantly suppressing their own desires.

While self discipline implies that you are exercising free choice, in fact you are aren’t free at all, psychologically speaking.

Researchers have found that people who can put off the payoff are not just better at self control, but they are unable to avoid it. They sometimes persist in a task, even when it clearly makes no sense to do so, and they tend to swing from one unhealthy extreme to another. We certainly see that in stress eating, dieting and binge eating.

Don’t Make This Mistake

What most people do when they try to lose weight is to install a policeman inside themselves. They create rules and regulations and try to force themselves to follow them. The problem with this approach is that we don’t like to be told what to do, even by ourselves. So this approach invites resistance and rebellion, which of course, results in breaking the rules.

The 50 billion dollar diet industry perpetuates the cycle of making rules and breaking them. Diet programs would have us believe that if you relax your guard, you will devour everything in sight. So if you buy into that, then it’s natural to start creating restrictions and depriving yourself, so that you won’t gain weight.

The “problem” with thinking in terms of rules and restrictions is that this approach creates a feeling of deprivation, which will undermine your attempts to control your eating.

What Counts

What counts is the capacity to choose whether and when to persevere, to control oneself and to stick to the rules. THIS, rather than self discipline, per se, is what we would all benefit from developing – the feeling that we have a choice, and that we can TRUST OURSELVES with our choices. It’s what we all want. We don’t want rules imposed on us, even from within. We want FREEDOM.

2 Types of Motivation

Intrinsic motivation is wanting to do something for its own sake – to read, for instance, because it’s exciting to lose oneself in a story. Extrinsic motivation is when the task itself doesn’t really matter; one might read in order to get a reward, to complete an assignment or to get someone’s approval.

Scores of studies have shown that the more you reward someone for doing something, the more they lose interest in what they had to do to get the reward.

Rewarding kids for good grades, for instance, results in less interest in learning. Some years back, there was a popular program that rewarded kids with pizza for reading a certain number of books. Critics of this program knew that this approach would only result in fat kids who don’t like to read.

Rewards may sometimes produce temporary compliance, but they do nothing to produce responsible, caring, happy people.

You can internalize certain rules and standards so that it feels like a choice. But just because motivation is internal doesn’t mean it’s ideal. If you feel controlled, even from within, you are likely to feel conflicted, unhappy, and perhaps less likely to succeed because of the tendency to rebel.

Control from within isn’t necessarily more humane. We can be harsher on ourselves than any outside force. And the more rigid the control, the less you feel like you have a choice. Some people can marshal the discipline to follow a diet for weeks, even months, but eventually, you are going to feel deprived because you are taking away your own choices.

Permissiveness is less worrisome than a fear of permissiveness that leads us to over-control ourselves and those we are responsible for.

Those who are always able to deny themselves with grim determination may be anxious, driven and motivated by a perpetual need to feel better about themselves.

So go ahead – relax, be happy, enjoy the holidays and have the treat once in awhile. Just make sure it’s you making the choices!

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Is Your Eating On Automatic Pilot?

Because eating is essential to life, it’s not surprising that it is part of a well-regulated system in our bodies and minds. We feel hungry, seek out and consume food, and experience a sense of satiety. Then the cycle is repeated over and over again.

This system runs automatically, but it is influenced by many factors. For instance, research shows that we eat more in groups, but we don’t spend time thinking about eating more in groups, or even being aware that we do it.

We just do it.

To this extent, all eating is regulated, albeit not necessarily by our conscious minds.

We rely on automatic regulation in many areas of life. It allows us to not have to think about every little decision. We don’t normally think about breathing, for instance, unless it becomes a problem. We don’t think about eating either, unless it becomes a problem. Relying on hunger alone doesn’t always work well. Hunger signals may arise at an inopportune time, or when food is not available.

Cues to eat are often dictated by factors other than physiological hunger. Simply seeing a certain food or being reminded of it can trigger the urge to eat.

Derrin Brown demonstrated the effect of subconscious cues (triggers) quite nicely in this video. This effect is not lost on advertisers or fast food chains.

Deliberately eating less then involves ignoring environmental cues (many of which you may not even be aware of) in order to weaken the association between the environment and the urge to eat.

The goal is to be as conscious as possible, but look what you are up against! For starters, consider these environmental factors and at least try to be more aware of them.

1. We eat more in groups.
2. We eat more from larger plates or containers.
3. Being in a certain situation or environment can trigger certain psychological states and the urge for foods that are associated with them (e.g. popcorn at the movies).
4. Certain people can trigger the urge for food or substances (e.g. “I always drink with John; Mom makes the best chocolate chip cookies.”)
5. The colors yellow and orange stimulate appetite. Ever notice the colors of fast food restaurants?
6. Even subliminal exposure to fast food symbols (e.g. golden arches) makes us feel time pressured, resulting of course in a tendency to choose “fast” food.
7. We buy 40% more when we use a larger grocery cart. Choose the smaller cart if there’s a choice.

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5 Steps To Managing Your Stress Eating Triggers

What’s a stress eating trigger? Anything that makes you want to eat. It could be something you see, hear, or smell. It could also be a thought or an emotion emanating from inside you. Yes, your own self talk could trigger the urge to eat!

The trigger is the WHY.

So it might go like this – “every time I feel tired, bored or frustrated, I have the urge for something sweet.”

Or…”every time I see a food commercial on TV, I want that food, even though I wasn’t at all hungry!”

Advertisers count on you being triggered by the delectable images they put in front of you. They WANT to get your mouth watering.

And sometimes we even KNOW logically that in reality, it doesn’t taste as good as it looks, as one client said to me “I’ve been to that restaurant, and the food isn’t all that good, but I wanted it anyway!”

A trigger can be something in our environment that creates a certain desire, or changes our behavior. Seeing on the clock that it is 12 noon can trigger the urge to eat, whether you are hungry or not.

How To Manage Triggers

1. Track your triggers. It’s critical to know what your triggers are, so you know what you are dealing with. Some of them may surprise you!

2. Write it down. We know from psychology that simply recording our behavior, changes our behavior.

3. Be curious. Sometimes just bringing this information into awareness, with curiosity is enough to make a change.

4. Tap, or use some other intervention to calm yourself when you realize that you have been triggered. The urge will often go away if you stay calm, and don’t give in to it right away.

5. Plan for the future. Think about situations and events that may be challenging in the future, and how you might get triggered. Create a strategy to deal with it in advance.

The Key

What’s important is to break the associations you have between the trigger and the urge to eat. You want to reduce the automatic nature of the behavior. Look for habitual patterns, and try to put a different, healthier pattern in place.

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