MANAGING EMOTIONAL EATING and YOUR EATING TRIGGERS
Posted on September 13, 2012 by Sharon Ball, One of Thousands of Health and Fitness Coaches on Noomii.
Many of us eat for reasons other than hunger and to lose weight we have to identify those reasons and make a plan to cope with them.
To manage emotional eating, you first have to determine what the problem is that you are self-medicating with food. What is the void is that you are trying to fill with food? Are you trying to relax, calm yourself or soothe yourself with food? Are you using food to cope with stress or loneliness or boredom? Are you using food to escape from some type of problem?
Food does provide temporary soothing for various types of emotional pain but unfortunately, the comfort food provides is superficial and temporary. Much too soon the effects of comfort food wear off and we are once again alone with our personal demons. No amount of food is going to fill us if what we need is self-love and self-care. It is necessary to determine what it is that we actually need and then provide for our own needs. All too often we wait for someone or something outside of ourselves to come along and give us love, validation, fill our emptiness, take care of us. Even if we come across someone willing to try and fill our emptiness, they will fill us with what they think we should want or what they themselves value. And we will still be empty. It is the responsibility of each of us to care for ourselves, love ourselves, and nurture ourselves. Who knows what you need better than you. And once you have filled your own empty spots, you will have what you need to give of yourself to others.
People tend to believe what we tell them. And if we tell others through our actions that we are needy and unlovable, why should they believe otherwise? You show your love for yourself when you make sure you eat healthy foods at regular intervals, when you get adequate sleep, when you exercise regularly, see your health care provider for preventative care, play regularly, celebrate yourself and your achievements, devote adequate time to your hobbies and those things that make you feel truly alive, live in and enjoy the present. Loving yourself and taking care of your own provides a basic foundation upon which the rest of your life builds.
When you find yourself bingeing or even after a binge, get out paper and pen and write the answers to the following questions in your journal (if you haven’t started journaling yet, you MUST start now):
1-What were the feelings that triggered this episode of overeating?
2- Was I lonely, stressed, angry, bored, anxious, exhausted, and emotionally drained?
Food can act as a drug, numbing your pain and “stuffing” emotional feelings of loneliness, anger, frustration, boredom, etc. (See the section below on sugar and carbohydrate addict ion.)You can cover up these feelings with food but the feelings don’t go away, they are just covered up temporarily. As soon as the food drug wears off, the painful feelings resurface. The best way of putting an end to this recurring problem is to explore your emotions, thoughts, feelings, circumstances in detail in your journal. Write fast without thinking too much so that your unconscious feelings and thoughts surface in your journal. After writing and exploring yourself in your journal in this way you will begin to identify subconscious belief patterns that are sabotaging your life. From there you can brainstorm ideas on how to learn the skills you need to better manage your painful feelings and subconscious belief patterns.
Keeping a journal will also help you identify your “triggers” to overeating. You can’t do anything about your triggers until you first identify them. Triggers can usually be categorized: social activities such as going out with friends or some type of emotional or physical stress such as fatigue, depression, loneliness or boredom, and specific activities such as watching television that often become associated with eating.
Unfortunately, the habit of overeating that is built around each trigger becomes pretty firmly entrenched over time. To break the habit of eating associated with triggers requires the desire to break the habit, recognition of each trigger, and substitution for another activity in place of the eating activity when the trigger occurs. Often you can eliminate some triggers through better stress management and better self-care. If you often over eat when overtired, try to avoid becoming over tired? If a trigger is opening a cabinet and seeing a bag full of cookies sitting there looking at you, clear out your cupboards so that there is less temptation on a day to day basis? If one of your triggers is boredom, can you take a walk, read a book, call a friend, or work on a craft project? If you love ice cream but all too often eat until the carton is gone, could you buy it in small serving size containers from now on? If your trigger is emotional pain, you can try to work it out in your journal, find a workbook dealing with the issue or get professional help from a therapist.
There are a few ways to identify whether your hunger is emotional or physical. Emotional hunger occurs suddenly instead of gradually. Emotional hunger demands to be fed immediately and physical hunger can wait. With emotional hunger you keep eating when you are full. With emotional hunger you desire specific foods compared to being willing a wide variety of foods with physical hunger. If the only thing you want is ice cream chocolate or cookies, you can bet it is emotional hunger. Feeding emotional hunger makes you feel guilty compared to no guilt when you feed physical hunger.
