When emotional eating becomes a habit where you’re experiencing perpetual, repetitive grief from it, it’s time to dive deep into those emotions and create some balanced practices for navigating them.
I’m willing to bet nearly everyone has experienced emotional eating at one point or one other of their lives. That’s normal — we’re all human!
But when the habit is formed and it’s left unaddressed, emotional eating could cause a terrific deal of added stress, anxiety, and guilt. It will probably ultimately lead you down a pathway towards an unhealthy relationship with food and possibly cause further mental and physical health challenges.
So let’s explore exactly what emotional eating is, determine in the event you’re doing it, and a couple of ways you’ll be able to begin coping along with your emotions in another way.
What’s Emotional Eating?
Emotional eating is when your emotions — anything from boredom to emphasize or grief — are guiding what, when, and the way much you eat.
Emotional eating doesn’t just need to be in response to a serious life event or intense news. It will probably also happen in response to day-to-day emotions comparable to boredom, loneliness, stress, anxiety, and even excitement.
It’s characterised by a lack of control around food while in an emotional state. Not only can we reach for food once we’re feeling emotional, but we frequently lack the flexibility to know our limits and exert restraint in response to satiety cues.
Are You Emotionally Eating?
Ask yourself the next 5 inquiries to determine whether or not you’re emotionally eating:
- Do you discover comfort in food if you’re emotional?
- Do you are likely to eat until you’re stuffed or uncomfortable if you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed?
- Do you could have trouble discerning the difference between hunger for food and need for food?
- Do you frequently use food as a reward?
- Do you are feeling uncontrolled around food?
When you said yes to three or more of those questions, you’re most probably emotionally eating.
How To Navigate Emotional Eating
Emotional eating is usually a habit greater than the rest.
We start to make use of food to assuage and address emotions unknowingly. Eventually, before we comprehend it we’re reaching for the bag of salty chips and chocolate ice cream each time work stress boils over.
With the intention to properly navigate emotional eating, we’d like to create a recent habit. A habit of identifying our emotions, acknowledging once we reach for food for emotional reasons, and determining recent ways to manage without food.
Among the best ways to do that is to utilize mindful eating!
Mindful Eating to Address Emotional Eating
Broadly speaking, mindful eating is a practice that permits you to be more intentional along with your eating habits while also maintaining a healthy relationship with food.
After we’re eating because of this of our emotions, we are likely to disconnect from the ritual and experience of eating. That is if you determine to have a few cookies to show you how to cope along with your emotions, then before you realize it you look down and your complete box is gone.
Hunger cues? What hunger cues?
Practicing mindful eating will can help you connect along with your food, appreciate it, and take control of your decisions.
1. Check-In With Yourself
The concept that you wish food pops into your head. You proceed to undergo the motions of obtaining said food, then devour the food and go on along with your day. Right?
But how often are you checking in with yourself after you choose you wish the food and before you obtain the food?
Simply checking in with yourself could make a world of a difference with regards to emotional eating.
It will probably be hard at first to distinguish if you’re truly eating as a consequence of hunger and if you’re eating in response to your emotions. Try checking in with yourself before you eat, each time you eat for only a day or two. Consider it as an experiment! Ask yourself, am I physically hungry? If not, how am I actually feeling?
This seemingly mundane, easy exercise can inform you loads about your emotional eating habits and tendencies.
2. Get To Know Your Hunger Cues
So what’s the cope with hunger cues?
Your hunger cues are your body’s way of signaling the necessity for energy or food. It’s a physical feeling or sensation triggered by a hormone called ghrelin. Ghrelin notifies your brain when it’s time to extend appetite and search out food.
When emotions start dictating when and the way we eat, it might probably be very easy to get into the habit of ignoring these hunger cues and easily eating when we wish to.
Take a while to reconnect along with your body and take heed to your hunger cues. When do you are feeling the feeling of hunger? How long does it normally take after a meal before you are feeling hungry again?
The higher you understand your hunger cues, the better it’ll be to call yourself out if you’re ignoring them.
3. Utilize Journaling
You should utilize journaling to handle the emotions you’re feeling. Possibly you’ve determined that if you’re stressed about work, you mostly reach for food.
Dive into that work stress. What’s it brought on by? Is any of it in your control? Are there things out of your control that it’s essential let go of?
Use journaling as a method to explore your emotions and work through them.
4. Redirect Your Energy
Habits are hard to interrupt, we will all agree with that.
Yet with that being said, replacing old habits with recent habits is a tried and true method for bridging the gap to behavior change.
Sometimes emotional eating can occur like clockwork. Possibly every evening after an extended day you decompress and take into consideration the entire stressors you’re currently facing, and subsequently, turn to food for comfort.
By redirecting your energy to something recent when this urge arises, you’ll be able to start to interrupt your existing emotional eating habit and replace it with a recent one.
Possibly you are taking out your journal, read a book, or make yourself a cup of hot tea. Whatever it’s, make sure that it’s something you truly enjoy, and never something you’re just doing because you must or need to.
It’s vital to notice that this is only one piece of the puzzle. Simply redirecting your energy won’t address the difficulty in its entirety, but when combined with the previous tactics we’ve discussed, your chances are high looking pretty good!
Put This Into Practice
Getting began is all the time the toughest part. Sometimes all we’d like is a little bit extra support!
Contained in the Mindful Nutrition Method™, we teach our members construct their very own, unique, positive relationships with food. We give them the tools, resources, and knowledge they should nourish themselves confidently.
Members are capable of recalibrate their relationships with food to maneuver past emotional eating and move forward with mindfulness and ease. Having a positive relationship with food is having power and autonomy over your life and your decisions, which is a stupendous thing!