How to Stop Emotional Eating and Make Peace with Food

Do emotions drive your eating? Sadness, boredom, exhaustion finds you at the bottom of a tub of ice cream, wondering how you got there.  Maybe you’re so accustomed to using food to drown your feelings, that each time you’re stressed you gravitate towards food. The urge is so strong that it seems uncontrollable. Having spent many years of my early adulthood as a self-confessed emotional eater, I know just how distressing it can be. Especially because you feel so ashamed after that last spoonful.  Worse, is that each evening you promise yourself that tonight’s going to be different, but somehow you find yourself munching through the contents of the fridge at a quarter to ten. So what exactly is emotional eating? It’s officially viewed as “eating in response to negative feelings”, but is emotional eating as bad as diet culture would have you believe, or is it something that’s OK just to live with? The first thing to understand about emotional eating is that sometimes what feels like emotional eating can simply be your body’s response to food restriction. When we restrict food (in the form of diets or restrictive healthy eating plans), this can lead to more thoughts about the exact foods you are restricting. Oh the irony. Then we start obsessing about these “forbidden foods”, so when we eventually cave in and eat them, we feel guilty and often out of control. It’s this that can sometimes be labelled as emotional eating. And remembe...
Source: PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: depression featured happiness health and fitness psychology self-improvement Emotional eating stress Source Type: blogs