Many people who have trouble losing weight are sabotaged by emotional eating. Sometimes when you crave strongly for food, you are at a weak, emotional point. You may unconsciously turn to food for comfort to keep yourself occupied when facing stress or a difficult problem.
Plenty of research has been done that confirms the link between food, mood, and weight loss. Emotional eating can be used to soothe or suppress negative emotions like boredom, anger, stress, loneliness, and more. As a result, there are triggers that can lead people to emotionally lean such as relationship problems, financial problems, unemployment, bad weather, or even fatigue. This is because it serves as a distraction so you do not have to deal with a painful situation. However, the good news is that you can regain control of your emotional eating habits.
Below are 7 great suggestions to help you lose weight and beat emotional eating:
1. Support – A great way to stop emotional eating as well as to lose weight is to lean on your support network of family or friends. You can also join a support group where you can meet new people if you are too embarrassed to get support from your friends and family members.
2. Stress Management – If you find that stress does have a factor to your emotional eating, why not try stress management techniques? This includes meditation, yoga, or general relaxation.
3. Hunger Check – If you are in a bad mood or facing a problem and are just about to open the kitchen pantry or the refrigerator – stop right now and do a hunger check to find out whether you are physically hungry or just emotionally hungry. If you do not have a rumbling stomach and ate recently, you most likely are not hungry. Just give this little food craving some time to pass.
4. Food Diary – If you are not sure whether there is a relation between your moods and eating habits, why not keep a food diary to monitor whether there is a pattern? Every time you eat, write down how much you honestly ate, what you ate, how hungry you are, and what feeling did you have prior to eating.
5. Healthy Snacks – Some people have the urge to crunch on something, or are in the habit of having a morning and afternoon tea. Instead of having a cake slice or a cookie, why not chew on something healthy such as vegetables, fruit, or almonds?
6. Boredom – If you find that you snack when you are bored or just not really that hungry, try to do something that excites you. This could include calling a friend, dancing to music, playing with your pet, reading, watching a video, and more to distract yourself from eating unnecessarily.
7. Therapy – Some self-help options will not suit people if the issue is more deep rooted. As a result, you should consider having therapy to truly understand your motivation of emotional eating and find some skills to help cope with it.
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Happily married mother of 2 beautiful children, fitness enthusiast, and traveler extraordinaire.