Emotional eating, or compulsive overeating, is eating as a way to cover up or cope with emotions and stress. For emotional eaters, food helps fill a void, such as loneliness or dissatisfaction. Sometimes an emotion triggers your appetite, such as eating when you feel angry or sad. At other times, a specific food triggers an emotion, such as sweets triggering happy memories of celebrations. Either way, you are eating to find pleasure, rather than to satisfy hunger, and the result is overeating. There are several ways to pull the reins on emotional eating.
Mindful Eating
Take time to look at your eating habits and emotional triggers, and make only one change at a time. Mindful eating techniques can help you establish routine eating habits and learn to eat only when hungry. Examples of mindful eating behaviors include always sitting down to meals rather than eating on the run or while standing, eating slowly and purposefully and taking the time to think about why you are eating so that you can recognize the difference between eating in response to emotional triggers and eating to satisfy hunger. It is also important to establish routine eating times and not to skip meals; otherwise, it is too easy to eat randomly or overeat at the next meal.
Food Strategies
Because emotional eating is often spontaneous, it helps to plan balanced meals in advance to establish a healthy eating routine and put a stop to random eating. Create menu plans that are based on healthful foods, such as whole grains, fruits, vegetables and lean cuts of meat, but also plan your meals around foods you enjoy eating. Use your menu plans to write up a shopping list. Eat before you go to the supermarket to reduce the temptation to buy junk food and convenience foods and help you stick to your shopping list.
Emotional Self-Talk
Self-talk is the way you communicate with yourself and it can be positive dialogue, such as "I am so proud of myself" or it can be negative and take the form of constant self-criticism. When it is negative, it can be self-defeating. The more you think negatively about yourself, the more you sabotage your efforts to change your eating behaviors, because you simply stop believing in your own ability to effect positive changes. You can change the way you think and feel about yourself by first listening carefully to your own self-talk and then practicing replacing negative thoughts with positive thoughts. For instance, if you hear yourself saying, "I'm so fat," immediately think, "I look 10 years younger than I am."
Professional Help
If your emotional eating habits are out of control, several types of counseling and therapy can help. Cognitive behavioral therapy can teach you how to track your eating behavior and help you change the way you think and act in relation to food. Individual or group psychotherapy can help you look deeper into your interpersonal relationships and learn how these relationships affect your eating patterns.
