Emotional Eating

When you eat your feelings are you eating intuitively?

Through a bit of observation and talking a lot about food, people always say “food makes me feel better.”  

Not to be straight from the book about why people tend to eat, but the first step to changing habits is realizing if and why you do them.

• When people feel sad about their weight being so far away from where they wish to be physically. This is known as stuffing your emotions. 
• Boredom seems to be another major contributor,especially because it’s so easy to sit in front of the television with a bag of chips.  Before you know it, your fingertips reach the bottom of an empty package.  
• Childhood habits that make you think back to times that you ate a specific food usually trigger emotional eating as well. 
• Stress, which raises your cortisol levels,triggers cravings for salty, sweet, fried foods make you feel like eating,nonstop. 

So, when intuitive eating advocates stress the importance of listening to your body cue and tell you to listen to hunger or fullness, or how great a workout treats your body, are they telling you to listen to your body and feed it when it is emotional?

NO. 

It’s important to recognize the difference between these two scenarios.  Be conscious of the first step to dealing with emotional eating.   

When we are listening to our body cues, we are listening to everything but our thoughts.

Eating emotionally because it makes us feel better is not body cue, it is a mentality.  We are tricking ourselves into thinking it is making us feel better, but the truth is,the act of eating is just distracting you from what is bothering you IN YOUR HEAD.

Some tips to alter emotional eating start with recognizing the difference between emotional and physical hunger. 

The best way to deal with situations like this is to recognize that you are not hungry because you are physically hungry, rather you are letting your mind decide for you. 

Next, reach for something other than food. 

If you’re sad, try a new activity or learn something new.  Perhaps, go out and try a different coffee at a new coffee shop, go to the nearest thrift store and look at new books, or simply try a new exercise.  There are countless inexpensive things that can keep your mind and body busy.  What’s overeating going to do for you? Maybe make you feel bloated and even worse about yourself?

If you’re bored, instead of sitting in front of the television with food, put a book in your hand OR a stress ball OR one serving portion of a snack that won’t allow you to overeat.  It’s actually better to simply remove snacking from your nightly television routine or limit the portion of snacks in front of you. 

After you starting recognizing the difference between a body cue and what your mind if telling you, you will be able to work on your emotional eating.