Emotional eating can be a difficult challenge when you are trying to lose weight. It's a difficult habit to break once it's a part of your life, but by understanding what causes it and finding ways to cope that don't involve food, you can overcome it. Read on to learn how to prevent and cope with emotional eating.
What is Emotional Eating?
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Before you can learn to cope with emotional eating, you must first understand what it is. As the name implies, emotional eating is characterized by repeatedly eating in response to feelings rather in response to hunger to gain physical nourishment. Emotional eaters often consume large amounts of food at one sitting, which is sometimes referred to as a binge.
Understand Common Emotional Cues
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Many emotional eaters eat in response to five common cues, which include boredom, loss of control and anger. Only you can know if these cues prompt you to eat emotionally: Eating a snack a few times a week because you are bored may not be a problem; eating a container of ice cream each time you're angry probably is. Understanding these cues and learning how to choose another response -- such as exercising to release pent-up anger -- will help you end the cycle of eating in response to these feelings.
Identify Your Triggers
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While many emotional eaters share cues in common, there may be certain feelings or situations that trigger you to eat that do not affect someone else. One of the best ways to understand your own personal emotional eating triggers is to keep a "food and feelings" food diary. In it, you simply record what you eat and how you were feeling before, during and after your binge.
Stress Affects Your Eating Habits
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Stress is one of the most common reasons that women in particular overeat. Stress is alleviated by eating certain foods and many women get in the habit of reducing tension by enjoying these foods rather than dealing with the source of their tension. By creating self-care skills that allow you to identify non-food solutions to tension-causing situations, you will be much less likely to eat emotionally after a stressful day.
Let Go of All or Nothing Thinking
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All or nothing thinking means you feel like you must do something perfectly or you should not do it at all. We often are either "on" our diets or "off" of them. The sense of failure this brings can cause negative emotions that in turn trigger a binge. By allowing yourself the freedom to face every day as a fresh start and see every decision as independent of the one before it, you may find emotional eating is much easier to avoid.
