Emotional eating is an eating habit that unfortunately receives very little attention in the world of weight loss. Emotional eating is indicated by the eating behavior you use to comfort yourself or to suppress boredom or other negative emotions. In this article, I explain what emotional eating is and how you recognize it and give you 4 tips that will help you do something about it yourself.
How does emotional eating occur?
A common reaction to stress is that you don’t feel like eating. Some do not take a bite in the throat. This is very functional from a short-term evolutionary point of view. Imagine going to the zoo standing in front of a lion. It helps if you don’t have a spasmodic hunger to distract you from danger.
But with emotional eaters, stress has the opposite effect. An emotional eater has a huge appetite when excited. One possible explanation for this is that someone in their youth has learned to comfort themselves with food when they have unpleasant feelings, and therefore has not learned to deal with feelings in a different way.
What can you do about it?
Fortunately, you may be able to do something about your emotional eating behavior yourself. Here are four helpful tips.
Note: not all tips will be equally useful to you. It is important to research what works for you.
Tip 1: keep a food diary
Emotional eaters are generally less aware of what is happening in their body and are less able to recognize exactly what they are feeling. As a result, emotional consumers often find it more difficult to figure out which emotions may be a reason for starting to want to eat. To increase your self-knowledge, I recommend that you keep a record of your eating habits for a week in a diary.
By doing this, you can easily make a connection on the days that you suffer from emotional eating between the situations that happened that day (or the days before) and the way you give meaning to these events.
Tip 2: ensure adequate relaxation
Another cause that increases the risk of emotional eating is stress and imbalance. Women (with a family), in particular, experience a lot of pressure and place great demands on themselves. They want to behave perfectly in different roles (mother, employee, partner) and also want a very slim figure. They are often away during the day and have little time to relax. All of these requirements you put on cost a lot of energy and can make you crave food even more.
To balance, it is important to relax enough. The following questions will help you with this:
- What do you want from yourself? What activities cost you energy and cause you stress?
- How could you work on this? What can or cannot influence?
- What activities could you relax with? I recommend writing this for yourself and planning the time for it. Specifically: When will you have time for it? When will you start?
Another important aspect is sleep. Are you sufficiently rested during the day?
If not, what can you do to improve your sleep?
Tip 3: prepare in advance for difficult times
This advice can be conflicting. You want to lose weight and probably not think about difficult times. However, I recommend that you prepare well. In the moment when you are not feeling well, it is much more difficult to imagine how to deal with a setback in a healthy and friendly way. Not having a plan for those times greatly increases the possibility of emotional eating.
How do you behave when you feel stressed and crave something delicious? Or how do you prepare for a setback? A good way is to formulate these intentions in the form of an if-then plan; “If situation X occurs I will do Y”.
Example: Suppose I feel stressed, I walk around a block instead of grabbing snacks.
Other examples of a good alternative to emotional eating:
- Call a friend
- read a book
- breathing exercises and mindfulness
Tip 4: track your results and reward yourself
Also, I recommend mapping your results. You can easily do this by writing down your goals and daily writing down how things went.
For instance:
Objective: If I get bored in the future, I will not eat snacks, but read a book.
If you’ve held onto this goal for a week, reward yourself with something fun. For example, buy a magazine or go to the movies.