Ok, time to get to the psychological side of the weight loss. Learning how to stop emotional eating is as important as following a healthy diet in order to lose weight, stay slim and healthy.
I’m so excited to share with you a strategic plan of actions you can easily apply to literally any situation and eventually unlearn emotional eating for good. This is the very essence of the information I learnt over the years and a brief summary of most effective strategies that worked for me and will undoubtedly work for you too.
Moreover, these tactics are equally effective for quitting smoking and saying “no” to that naughty glass of wine or JD.
1. Is Your Hunger Real or Fake?
So here’s a thing. We have 2 types of hunger. One of them is PHYSICAL HUNGER that is a natural signal sent by your body when it has a biological requirement for nourishment and energy. Physical hunger develops gradually over hours and has different stages. It can vary from a requirement only for a light snack to being extreme hunger when you feel dizzy and can barely make it to a kitchen. People can endure physical hunger while they are busy doing something else and want to finish a particular task before going to eat. Good examples would be working or commuting. Also, when you’re physically hungry you’re open to a wide range of foods and physical hunger pleasantly goes away after eating food and turns into a feeling of satisfaction. Physical hunger is a signal that you can trust and must listen in order to survive. That’s how all live humans and animals are created.
As for EMOTIONAL HUNGER, it is not associated with the requirement for nutrients and instead it is caused entirely by your emotional state. It arises spontaneously and the response to it usually is thoughtless, very quick and impulsive. You just grab and eat it without thinking much. Secondly, emotional hunger very often (but not always) is very specific and is for particular foods which all can be classified into “comfort foods” group. These are foods, drinks and sauces that have very distinctive, sharp, vibrant taste and texture: chocolate, ice cream, pastries, cakes, cookies, syrups and other desserts or sugar-loaded drinks as well as pizzas, burgers, fast food, crisps etc. When your body isn’t physically hungry, it doesn’t produce the enzymes and hormones needed to break down the food. That’s why the normal food doesn’t appeal nor tastes good, and that’s what causes us to search for a ‘stronger stimulation’ of our taste buds. The worst thing is that emotional hunger won’t go away after eating. You can eat in piles, packs, pots, buckets, triple size portions, but no amount of food will give you desired satisfaction. The reason for that? Food is the wrong tool for what you’re trying to fix. Emotional eating is detached from physical needs and it is exactly from what you need (and will!) learn how to break free.
Emotional eating is not necessarily rushing to the fridge to grab a triple chocolate cake or binge eating. It can also take forms of:
• Automatic thoughtless eating just because it is breakfast / lunch /dinner time or just because everyone else is eating
• Habitual eating just because “I always order a dessert” / “I always drink this with sugar“ / “I always add this sauce/syrup to my meal”
• Eating something just because “it’s here and it’s nice”
• Eat while you can (when food is free, such as in a hotel with all-inclusive package)
• Rewarding yourself with food
• Overeating: continuing to eat after you are already full
There’s nothing wrong in sometimes having a dessert or a fun meal that is not so healthy. It becomes a problem when you develop a habit to turn to food to deal with your life. And well, life happens every day. Emotional eating wrecks not only your figure and weight loss plans, but also your health and emotional wellbeing.
2. Recognise Your Triggers
Know your enemy. Let’s have a look of the most popular triggers of emotional eating:
• Feeling lonely
• Depression
• Difficult relationship
• Feeling of not being accepted
• Lack of love
• Sadness
• Frustration
• Feeling unsafe
• Loss, whether monetary or of a friend or a loved one
• Stress and feeling tense
• All kind of changes in one’s life or too many events
• Resistance and not wanting to do things you have to (e.g. job you dislike)
• Having to keep quiet about your feelings, emotions or information you received
• Boredom
• Unhappiness
• Disappointment
• Frustration
• Failing to get the desired thing or results (in either area of your life)
• Regret
• Guilt
• Shame
• Anger
• Disapproval of yourself, feeling worthless or worse than others
• Feeling fat or ugly
• Unsatisfied desire for sex
• Fear
• Worry
• Feeling of deprivation (not necessarily food, but also of opportunities or money)
• Feeling emotionally overwhelmed
• Discomfort or pain (either physical or emotional)
• Tiredness and exhaustion
• Emotional emptiness
• Lack of pleasure or positive emotions in either area of your life
• PMS (Ladies, I’ll talk about this in my other blog post as this is a very specific area)
The most effective way to identify whether a particular desire to eat something is emotional or physical is to ask yourself this question:
Am I hungry or do I want to change how I feel?
Ask yourself this question each and every time you think about reaching for food. Practice this religiously and after some time you’ll be an expert in understanding your impulses. Recognising that you are emotionally hungry is your first step in fighting it.
3. Use the Right Tools
Interestingly, there is a well-recognised doctrine in psychiatry saying that most our addictions, such as smoking, drinking and overeating are associated with our mouth, because it was the first organ we felt pleasure with when we were breastfed. Whether you learned this habit as an adult or in childhood (e.g. when parents expressed their love by buying you an ice cream or a candy), you learned that food can soothe bad feelings. Emotional eating is basically a method of running away from a difficult situation, compensating the lack of desired emotions and numbing the pain. Food is convenient and easy to get, it distracts from thoughts, it gives you various sensations or may even bring back positive memories.
The problem is that the effect lasts only for 10-15 minutes. Your emotional discomfort, which all this time while you were eating simply remained behind the scene awaiting for the curtain to rise, will come right back at you like a boomerang! Only this time it will be bundled with a feeling of guilt, sensation of heaviness and weight gain. And let’s face it: these only double your existing problems and make you feel even worse. Learn this by heart and reiterate this to yourself to the point you can repeat it in your sleep:
Food is a wrong tool for what you’re trying to fix.
Think of it as trying to plug a wrong cable into a USB port in your laptop and wondering why it doesn’t work. So! After you’ve identified that your hunger is emotional and is generated by your head rather than your stomach, what you need to do is:
Address the underlying problem
This is a three-stage process, which is essentially pushing a breaks pedal to your emotional hunger.
1. Ask yourself how you feel
Pause and have an open talk with yourself to investigate how you feel. Do I feel lonely? Do I feel upset by what someone did or said? Do I feel unhappy in my relationship or with my career? Do I feel worthless? Do I feel exhausted? Tired? Annoyed? Scared? Ugly? Unwelcome? Unloved? You get the idea.
2. Ask yourself what you need
This depends heavily on what you’ve answered to the first question. For example, if you are exhausted, you need rest. If you are feeling lonely, you need communication. If you feel scared, you need a plan and confidence.
3. Ask yourself what you can do
Think of a possible solution to your problem and act. In some cases this is easy. If you’re exhausted, lie down and have a rest. Find the time, even if it’s 10 minutes it will do the trick. If you can’t do it immediately, promise yourself in your mind to do it later at the earliest opportunity.
However, not all things can be resolved instantly. If you feel lonely, you may not find a loved one immediately to fill in your emotional emptiness. In situations like these, what you need to do is start thinking on a plan of how to get what you want. For example, if you feel unhappy with your career, start thinking of what you can do to change the situation. If you’re unhappy with your appearance, think how you can change what you don’t like in yourself. From my experience, I assure you, this will make you feel better. Think of a plan and act. That’s all you need to do.
In the meantime, do something else that makes you feel good, which is not related to food. Yes, go on and spoil yourself a bit! We all have something that we like and that has a positive effect on our emotional balance. Make a list of such things for yourself and do them every time you feel you need it! I call it:
A ‘Rescue Pick-Me-Up’ list
These are essentially small simple things that make you feel good. They can be combined with one another or sometimes each activity may be suitable only for specific situation. Everyone is different and so your rescue pick-me-ups may differ from mine, but just for the purposes of giving you an idea, here are some of my little heroes that make me feel better:
♥ Lighting up candles
♥ Clean home, fresh bedlinen
♥ Wearing a perfume, aromatherapy, vaporising essential oils
♥ Cuddling in bed or on a sofa and watching a good easy-going movie or comedy show
♥ Reading an interesting easy-going book or article
♥ Calling my bestie or mum (or setting a date to meet them)
♥ A hug
♥ Positive memories or reminding myself of a recent positive event
♥ Watching make up or hair style tutorials and trying something new on myself
♥ Freshly washed and styled hair
♥ Pampering myself
♥ A walk and any activity that involves fresh air
♥ Playing with kids
♥ Laughing
♥ Going for a run and breaking a sweat
♥ Taking a shower
♥ Creative work, like improving my blog, decorating my house, photography
♥ Bubble bath for 15 minutes
♥ Thinking about, preparing and making a gift for husband, kids or parents
♥ Listening to music
As you can see, nothing too overly difficult is involved. As I said above, we’re all different, so you need to take time and think what could be that simple activity that normally makes you feel better. By the way, have you noticed that there’s no ‘eating an apple/carrot’ or ‘drinking a healthy smoothie’ kind of activity included in that list? Cause it will also be emotional eating and if we are on a mission to unlearn it, we need to detach that reflex to eat (doesn’t matter if healthy or unhealthy food) in response to emotional discomfort.
4. Write it all down
Several years ago when I was battling my emotional eating, I carried a small notepad with me where I have drawn a table like this:
Putting your thoughts and plans into words on paper is extremely powerful! Your feelings and thoughts obtain a shape, become somewhat smaller, weaker, less dramatic and less painful, whereas plan of action becomes easy and doable. If you ever feel the same way again, you can always go back to your notes and obtain the same calming effect and get reminder and support. Same is with writing down the ‘rescue pick-me-up’ list, because you can always open your notes whenever you’re lost and pick an activity that suits best in your current situation. Most importantly, writing it all down and revising your notes will help you practice and learn new ways how to respond to the emotional discomfort without turning to food. This exercise helps embed new ideas and develop new habits, so after a while you won’t need a notepad as these new habits will be your second nature.
5. Practice makes perfect
To summarise:
♥ First things first – pause. Instead of immediately reaching for food, ask yourself “Am I hungry or do I want to change how I feel?”
♥ Then be an investigator and ask yourself how you really feel. Decode emotions. Spot the trigger.
♥ Ask yourself what you really need.
♥ Ask yourself what you can do. If you can’t do it now, make a plan of actions and/or do any activity from your ‘Rescue Pick-Me-Up’ list.
♥ Write it all down, make notes, return to them regularly, edit or add if needed.
♥ Learn by heart and remind yourself regularly that food is not the right tool for what you’re trying to fix.
♥ And:
Do it. Do it again. Keep doing it.
As an afterword, do not underestimate yourself. Your mind is so much more powerful than you think. You are times more capable and stronger than you think. You have a power over food, your behavior and your life. You don’t have to be a victim and you can be a creator instead. You have a choice. And you got everything you need to make a change. It’s already within you.
Next Blog Post - How to Become Bulletproof to Emotional Eating
Next Blog Post - How to Become Bulletproof to Emotional Eating
No comments:
Post a Comment