What is Emotional eating?
If you eat in response to your feelings, you are an emotional eater. Often emotional eating has nothing to do with hunger. In essence, it means your emotions and not your body dictates you to eat.
When and How Do Emotional Eaters Over-Eat?
Emotional eating can be trigerred by certain emotions or feelings like sadness or confusion or depression.Eating is resort people take in order to divert their mind from a certain problem.
If you'd eat for comfort by reaching into our crisper drawer, you'd be okay. But how many people turn to carrot sticks when they're feeling stressed? I don't know a single one; do you?
Here lies the big problem. It is the high-fat and high calorie diet that makes you feel better. The more fattening, sweeter or saltier the diet, the better you seem to feel.
Though it might help you divert yoour mind, it essentially builds up fat in your body making you overweight.
Are You an Emotional Eater?
You are an emotional eaters if you answer yes to any of the following questions:
- Do you ever eat without realizing you're even doing it?
- Do you often feel guilty or ashamed after eating?
- Do you often eat alone or at odd locations, such as parked in your car outside your own house?
- After an unpleasant experience, such as an argument, do you eat even if you aren't feeling hungry?
- Do you crave specific foods when you're upset, such as always desiring chocolate when you're feeling depressed?
- Do you feel the urge to eat in response to outside cues like seeing food advertised on television?
- Do you eat because you feel there's nothing else to do?
- Does eating make you feel better when you're down or less focused on problems when you're worried about something?
How to deal with Emotional Eating
First, you have to recognize you are eating emotionally. Work at catching it at the moment or if possible, before you even start. And before you take a bite of food simply ask yourself a few questions, such as, "What's going on that's making me want to eat?" If you can even take one minute before you put food in your mouth and ask that question, you'll probably be able to stop a lot of your emotional eating patterns.
It helps to know what type of emotional issues you're dealing with when you are about to reach for food. So let me describe the difference between two types of emotional hunger. With this technique you can identify what emotional need or feeling you're having based on the kind of food you are craving. Here's how it works: When you are wanting a food that is chewy or crunchy, such as nuts, potato chips, and candy bars, those kinds of food are associated with pressure-type emotions; things like anger, frustration, irritation, and simply stress.
When you realize you want something chewy or crunchy, ask yourself, "What is it in life right now that I want to chew on?" You'll probably know immediately. Maybe it's your boss or your kids or the project that's due in an hour. Once you identify what you want to chew on, ask yourself, will eating change this? Of course not. Your boss will still be yelling at you; your kids won't stop misbehaving; and the project won't go away just because you eat.
So simply think about what can you do instead to deal with that situation instead of eating. Maybe you need to take a walk or take a few deep breaths, but finding something other than food to cope is the goal. I call that type of emotional eating Head Hunger.
Now, here's the opposite one: When you are craving a food that is smooth, creamy, soft, or perhaps comfort food, you are probably dealing with an empty emotion. So think about foods such as ice cream, pasta, or donuts, those foods are typically associated with things like sadness, loneliness, restlessness, boredom, or other empty feelings or awareness that you are missing something in life. I call this Heart Hunger.
With this type of emotional need, ask yourself, "What's missing right now? What's empty? What am I wishing for?" Then see if you can do something to take care of those needs instead of grabbing food. Perhaps a phone call to a friend or taking a hot bath would be the solution. Go back to what I said about teddy bears. Look for things that will nurture and comfort you, rather than asking food to do it for you.
So now you can identify what emotional need you're having based on the food you crave and it gives you a much easier way to know what you need to do to keep yourself from eating. In working with issues of emotional eating, start by doing very tiny changes, instead of worrying about changing your whole life. For example, when you are feeling really stressed at work, instead of running to the vending machine for a candy bar, simply sit up straight and do what I call the Seven Breaths.
Here's how it works: You take seven slow deep breaths, making each one slower and deeper than the one before. By the time you reach number five, you will start to lose count, and by number seven, you'll find that you've gotten through the crisis and you will feel calmer, perhaps enough to carry on and not need the candy bar.
Source:http://weightloss.about.com/od/emotionsmotivation/qt/bleewhatis.htm
