Although good nutrition is the basis for any diet program, in order to lose weight, emotional eaters must learn to differentiate between true hunger and the emotional triggers that precipitate mindless eating. While stress, loneliness, anger and boredom are emotions that most people face daily, emotional eaters use food to distance themselves from their feelings or to reward themselves for good behavior. If you believe your feelings and emotions are preventing you from eating a healthy diet, consult with a nutritionist who has experience helping dieters to overcome their emotional eating behaviors.
Significance
Besides unwanted weight gain, emotional eating can have serious physical, social and mental health consequences. Overeating undermines your confidence and overall sense of well being. Guilt and embarrassment can cause the emotional eater to make unhealthy lifestyle changes and to avoid social situations where food is present.
Expert Insight
A major challenge for emotional eaters is to stay in the moment and learn to identify the feelings you are trying to eliminate with mindless eating. According to nurse practitioner Marcelle Pick, in order to control your emotional eating patterns, you must first learn to identify the specific feelings that trigger your cravings for food. Most emotional eaters use food to either eliminate negative feelings, or to enhance or prolong positive emotions. And because emotional eaters tend to use food as both a reward and punishment, your food preferences may vary according to how you are feeling at any particular moment.
Techniques to Manage Your Emotions
Because the stress response is a frequent trigger to eating when you are not hungry, learning to maintain a sense of self-control is an important first step in controlling your emotions. While yoga and other forms of relaxation therapies help to control your stress levels over the long-term, a self-guided meditation or a brief activity designed to stimulate your sense of touch, smell or sound, might provide you with more immediate results. By learning to recognize the onset of the stress response, you can take immediate action to regain a sense of calm.
Tips
Establish a daily routine that includes some form of exercise that you enjoy. A food diary will help you to track the food you eat throughout the day, as well as any specific circumstances and emotions that precipitate your food intake. Make a list of several 10 or 15-minute activities that you can do to postpone eating when you are not really hungry. Strive to find a balance between your work and social life, and foster the relationships between friends who share your personal goals and interests. Avoid contentious people and situations as much as possible.
