How to Beat Emotional Eating
Are you an Emotional Eater?
- Do your feelings drive your appetite and your eating behavior?
- Do you eat when you are not hungry?
- Do you continue to eat when you are full?…stuffed?…about to explode?
- Do you ever find yourself on the couch with your hand at the bottom of a LARGE bag of chips?
- Do you eat like this while you are alone?
- When you are bored?
- When you are stressed?
- To take your mind off of your problems?
- Do you feel guilty about this behavior?
YES
Then you are an Emotional Eater.
And you’re not alone.
So What Do You Do?
If you think that your manner of eating may constitute a threat to your health, please contact your doctor.
And here is some solid reference info:
- Wikipedia lists 25 different types of eating disorders
- Medscape has a good Eating Disorder Resource Centre
- The Canadian National Eating Disorder Information Centre (NEDIC) has lots of info & resources
- The Mayo Clinic
What Do You Do Right Now?!
One tool you should look into right away is Mindful Eating.
Here are some links to mindful eating sites.
In the past few years, the practice of mindful eating has grown out of the more generalized psychiatric practice of Mindfulness Meditation, made popular by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
It finds it’s origin in Buddhist teachings. The Buddhist practice of Mindfulness can be defined as “awareness of one’s thoughts, actions or motivations”.
A similar practice is currently being espoused by Oprah’s protege, Mr. Eckhart Tolle.
TLC’s – I Can Make You Thin with Paul McKenna employed mindful eating in it’s weight loss plan.
In the 1920′s, Horace Fletcher was the diet guru of the day with his theory of Fletcherizing.
Mindful Eating – The Basics
Eat consciously. By this I mean:
- Take a bite of food
- Put down your implements/sandwich/glass/etc…
- Chew your food
- Taste your food
- Enjoy your food
- Repeat until you ‘think’ you are starting to feel full
- Stop Eating
- Eat again when you are hungry – not bored or nervous – listen for a ‘grumbly tummy’
That’s It.
Charles Goldman
May 29, 2008 at 12:46 am
This is a very helpful (and entertaining) post on an important cause of overeating and unhealthy weight gain. I like your summary of how to eat mindfully.
Marcie Lesnick
July 2, 2008 at 4:01 pm
I would love to exchange links with you for our blogrolls. Please let me know if your interested. I have a lot of clients who have food issues. Thanks, marcie
DR
July 2, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Sounds good.
I will add your site today.
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Nancy
November 8, 2010 at 11:15 am
I am very grateful for this post. This is a tremendous issue for many people who try and consistently fail to lose weight. Another excellent tool for emotional eaters is journaling. it worked really well for me in my weight loss. When you know you should work out but won’t get off the couch, writing feelings down in a journal can help sort out why that happens. If you are craving unhealthy foods in excess and aren’t hungry, or have binged, a journal of precipitating thoughts and events can identify emotional triggers to avoid in future.
Shawn
March 14, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Alright – perhaps the universe is trying to tell me something. While browsing through amazon several books on mindful eating popped up as recommendations for me. It’s the first time I had seen any of the titles… and then this post bringing up the same subject.
Hmmmm
ioanaradu
December 8, 2011 at 6:35 am
I gave up voleyball when I went to collage 4 years ago and I put on 20 kg. Now that I think how I did it is because emotional eating to. I tend to wish everyting that looks good and smells nice. Have no idea how to resist my temptations.