If you find yourself snacking compulsively when you're not hungry, you may be using food as a distraction from everyday problems. The Mayo Clinic notes that emotional eating leads you to reach for a bite when you're anxious, upset or want an escape from personal or professional setbacks. Develop strategies to help you recognize and reduce the habit before the overeating induces guilt or weight gain-related health problems.
Keep a Journal
If you're unsure if it's negative emotions, boredom or a bad habit that's leading you to eat when you're not hungry, write in a food diary to track the pattern. Each time you eat, write the date, time, type of food and how you were feeling physically and mentally. Study the entries that indicate that you ate when you weren't feeling hungry, and track your emotional state on each of those occasions. You may discover that you snack when you're home alone, as a "treat" for a completed task or as a way to relieve boredom or stress. Once you uncover a pattern, you may be able to develop a distraction to keep yourself busy during those "danger" periods.
Distract Yourself
Curb emotional eating by determining if you're truly hungry before you take a bite. Take a tip from the Children's Medical Center of Dayton and wait for 10 minutes before eating a snack. If you don't exhibit signs of true hunger, such as a lack of energy and a growling stomach, or if your "hunger" goes away after drinking a glass of water, avoid eating until you are hungry.
Find an Outlet
Devise a way to keep yourself busy if you often eat out of loneliness or boredom. Take a class to develop a new hobby such as photography, painting, scrapbooking or karate. Not only will the hobby keep your mind occupied and your hands too busy to reach for food, you may also make new friends in the classes. The Help Guide website recommends taking up exercise such as walking, swimming, bicycling or dancing. The active hobby has the added benefit of reducing stress and helping you lose any weight you may have gained because of the emotional eating habit.
Avoid Temptation
Remove your ability to reach for food out of habit by removing snack foods from your home. Avoid the junk food at the supermarket to ensure you won't have anything tempting to reach for if you get a craving, or stock your refrigerator with carrot and celery sticks if you want a healthy alternative when you need something to munch.
Get Help
The Mayo Clinic recommends seeking the guidance of a mental health professional if you're unable to tame an emotional eating habit on your own. An expert can help you uncover the root of your eating problem, help you deal with the underlying issue or determine if you suffer from another disorder that is masking itself as emotional eating.
