Are you Eating Your Emotions?

How do you know you’re just snacking versus emotional eating?

If you find yourself eating when you are not hungry, mindless snacking, feeling compulsions to eat more than is needed (like finishing the bag of potato chips), you are emotional eating.

Emotional eating is an attempt to avoid your emotions by eating, eating to change the feeling, even if the feeling is very subtle.

You might find yourself eating when you are stressed, eating after a conflict with a coworker, or eating before a big test or presentation.

What are the dangers of emotional eating?

Emotional eating over time can cause you to gain weight, but because its also an avoidance of dealing with your feelings in a more positive and constructive way, these emotions just recirculate and can affect other areas of your life, like your relationship.

How do we keep ourselves from emotional eating?

Identify the driving emotion. One tip that you can use the next time you find yourself mindless snacking is to ask yourself, “What do I really want?” and notice what comes to mind. You may be looking for a feeling. For example, one of my clients, chocolate meant happiness, another one, alcohol meant being herself and connection with others.  Its really this want for the positive emotion that drives the craving or behavior.

Take a moment to care for your emotions. Once you’ve identified the emotion, you can start to take care of yourself at a deeper level. Often times, we feel emotions just happen to us, but we don’t have to “do” anything to change our emotions. We can feel an emotion just by thinking about it. For example, if chocolate means happiness, rather than going to chocolate to get the feeling of happiness, you can feel happiness just by thinking about the things that make you happy.

Emotions are messengers

Emotions are giving us useful information about ourselves and our life. If we ignore, deny or suppress them with food, we are not getting the message. When you’ve identified the emotion, ask the question, “what is this telling me?” Emotions can range from simple to complicated. Sometimes our brain can be playing old tapes, like, “I’m not good enough” which then turns into feeling down or depressed. Sometimes our emotions tell us about our communications and relationships. As you ask the question, what is this telling me, you’ll begin to identify the pattern that is causing the emotion and then take action to address it at its source.

I have a whole chapter addressing emotions and emotional eating in my book,  A Lighter You! Train your Brain to Slim your Body. Get it here: A Lighter You Train your Brain to Slim your Body.

The bottom line comes down to self awareness. The more you develop the presence of mind to ask, “What do I really want?” and pay attention to the answers you get, the more in touch you become with your own brain and body system. And the more intuitive you can become with your eating habits.

Here’s to Creating Your Healthy Lifestyle in Easy, Fun and Tasty Ways!

Holly