How to Deal With Emotional Eating
May 21st, 2010 | diseases and conditions |
Emotional eating is one of the major reasons for rising obesity among teenagers and young adults throughout North America. Emotional eating occurs when one consumes large amounts of food in response to feelings, whether good or bad, instead of hunger cues.
Some of the most common emotions can bring out an eating response in you and should be recognized as your emotional cues. They include:
Anger – Often when people get angry, instead of confronting the emotions and people responsible head on, some try to swallow their feelings – in the source of food.
Depression – People who are depressed or feel large amounts of helplessness turn to food as a means of making themselves feel better.
Control – People who feel that they are lacking control in their lives, for example, are in financial trouble and don’t feel like they can handle their situations, turn to food because it is the “only” thing that they can control.
Boredom – It is fact that people who are bored tend to consume more calories because it is an act that doesn’t require any thinking and eating can fill empty voids of time.
Indulgence – Just because you have accomplished something that you’ve been working very hard on does not mean that you have to indulge in food to make yourself feel good.
The key to treating your emotional eating is to determine what your emotional triggers are. Sit down in a quiet room with paper and pen and list out the reasons why you eat. You may be very surprised at the length of your list. Next, create a corresponding list that will help you replace eating with other activities that can make you feel good. Maybe the next time you are bored, you can go for a 20 minute walk. Not only will you give your mind a change of pace, you will be circulating blood throughout your body making you feel refreshed but also burning some calories while you are at.
Learn to recognize hunger cues, signs that you body is actually hungry and not just going through a craving. Hunger is described as feeling like a gnawing feeling in the stomach and should not be confused with the salivation occurred when thinking about particular food. If you are truly hungry, any type of food would become appetizing. Of course, you do not want to starve yourself into this point but you should understand what it actually feels like to be hungry. You can try drinking a glass of water to see if the feeling goes away. If it does, it was just a craving and you are well on your way to relearning how to eat properly again.