5 Effective Strategies to Cut Down On Emotional Eating
During times of stress, anxiety, anger or
sadness, there are some of us that tend to turn to food in order to make
us feel better. Emotional overeating creates a huge barrier to weight
loss, and also creates psychological and physiological reliance on food
for the sake of coping emotionally. If you suffer from this problem,
here are five strategies that you can implement so that you can conquer
your emotional overeating once and for all:
1. Name that mood
Overcoming emotional overeating requires a
clearer understanding of what actually happens when someone feels
inclined to indulge in the behavior. Try keeping a diet journal and take
note of your mood each time you eat. Doing so will allow you to
identify when you had an emotional overeating episode. It will also help
you figure out how often you eat when you’re in a bad mood, the time of
day it’s most likely to occur, as well as which days of the week it’s
likely to occur on. Last but not least, you’ll also be able to figure
out which foods you need to get rid of.
2. Ride the storm out
As its name suggests, emotional overeating occurs due to an individual
feeling a negative emotion. What the overeating does is distract you
from feeling the emotion and prevent it from running its course. During
the onset of a negative emotion, you should allow yourself to experience
what you’re feeling rather than doing something to prevent you from
feeling it. The next time that you have an overwhelming emotion, just
let it run its course and take no action to prevent it. You’ll be
surprised at how quickly the emotion subsides, and you’ll avoid
overeating in the process.
3. Don’t empower your vices
When you resort to emotional overeating
when feeling a negative emotion, you are empowering your food to be more
than just nutrition. You give it power over you by allowing it to
become a coping strategy, which means that your desire for it will
intensify. You condition yourself to believe that food is a requirement
for getting through tough times. Furthermore, if you happen to turn to
high-fat and/or high-sugar foods, they can have an impact on the part of
the brain that manages stress, thus reinforcing your reliance on
emotional overeating. If you really must eat something, reach for raw
fruit or vegetables, because these foods will have little to no effect
on your brain activity.
4. Learn healthy coping mechanisms
Rather than turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as substance
abuse or spending many hours at a time in front of the television, you
should turn to healthy ones, such as exercising or talking with a
supportive friend. When considering a coping strategy that’s likely to
work for you, you should ask yourself: ““Will doing this make me feel
better or worse right now?” and “Will doing this make me feel better or
worse tomorrow?”. If the answer to both questions is better, then it’s
likely to be a healthy coping mechanism.
5. Becoming a master of hard times is the key to long-term success
There are many that do not commit
themselves to weight loss due to a “busy and stressful” time in their
lives. Such people are known as Fair Weather Losers, meaning that they
are capable of losing weight and living healthily only when everything
in their lives is calm. The key to genuinely living healthily is to
challenge yourself to keep healthy even when life gets stressful.