5 Steps to Control Your Emotional Eating

Emotional eating can really destroy your weight loss plans. Making sure that you get a grip on this will really help you lose weight in the future.

Before we get too far in, though – If you want to know how to control emotional eating, you should know for sure exactly what it is.

See, sometimes we get a longing to eat for reasons that have nothing to do with actual hunger. We have desires for food (usually fattening foods that are salty or sweet) when emotions are in highs or lows. We have the urge to eat, and we think nothing else will make us better.

You might recall how people say that they gain lots of weight when they break up with someone, for example.

Emotional eating sometimes happens when there’s a major incidence to trigger it, such as the a breakup, a job loss, etc. It can also happen for smaller things, such as being nagged at by a boss, or dealing with traffic.

The problem with emotional eating is that it makes problems even worse, because it leads to guilt issues, weight gain, and poor health.

If you want to know how to control emotional eating, there are a few things that you can do right away.  Read more...

1. Figure out why you eat at certain points and what events “trigger” it.
2. Identify what your true hunger signals are… and what the signals are when you just want to emotionally eat.
3. Reduce the availability of your trigger foods. Simply buy less of them and don’t have them around the house.
4. No skipping meals… this just leads to more emotional eating.
5. Find other ways to let out your stress.

How Do You Stop Emotional Eating

If you want to know how to end emotional eating, congratulations. It takes a strong person to even recognize that they might be doing this.

To begin with, let’s identify what emotional eating actually is.

It’s eating when a specific incidence (or set of incidences) happen that produces a “high” or “low” feeling for someone.For example, someone might seek comfort in food after a bad day at work, a fight with a loved one or even something small such as having to sit in a lot of traffic before or after work.

Sometimes the strongest cravings for food happen when you’re at your weakest point emotionally. That is when many people may turn to food for comfort.

Conversely, one might emotionally eat when there are good things happening as well. People often gain weight when they’re in relationships because they’re so happy and comfortable.

It’s important to acknowledge that sometimes people get urges to eat food for reasons that have little to do with being hungry, but more of catering to our desires. We get desires to eat and we think that the only cure for these temptations is to eat fattening foods (and in actuality, there are more healthy things that can be done).

Emotional eating only leads to downward spirals because it makes the problem worse since it leads to feelings of guilt, packing on weight, and overall adding poor nutrition to the body.

Emotional eating can destroy anyone’s weight loss plans. Emotional eating often leads to eating too much, especially too much of the wrong kind of food such as high-calorie, sweet, fatty foods.  Read more...