Stop Your Emotional Eating

Did it ever occur to you that sometimes eating makes you feel good in certain cases? Specially when you are sad and depressed. It is not always our physical hunger that leads to over eating, sometimes it is a mean of distraction and sometimes we eat to treat ourselves in joy. You might have seen people eating pizza when they are sad, ice cream when they feel bored, tea when feeling lazy or dull and many more! Emotional eating is all about making yourself feel better by eating food but unfortunately it really doesn’t help with fixing your emotional problems, it just distracts you from your current mental state. Afterward your emotion is still and there and you end up gaining weight. 

Usually eating food for making you feel better isn’t always a bad thing, its just the choice of food that makes it a bad thing. When eating is your primary way of coping emotional distress, you stop learning healthier and better ways to deal with your emotional state. There’s this one thing that you really need to understand which is, emotional hunger can not be filled with food at all and you should always avoid triggering the point where you start over eating for every emotion. 

Common causes of emotional eating

There are a lot of theories out there for emotional eating. Sometimes it is often associated with stress, discomfort and depression, sometimes its is just your childhood habits, when people give you food to make you calm down, sometimes its just the sub conscious mind that tells you to eat when you are feeling happy or sad. We have made food our most concerning point, we try to eat food in terms of “treat” on someone’s success, we make food to stop boredom, sometimes we even prepare food for someone having a rough day as a token of care and love, so it is everywhere. We cannot kick out the love for food from our lives, we can only try to make healthy choices regarding the food. 

There are theories that suggest emotional eating is a disorder, but it is not. Emotional eating can be considered as disorder eating when:

• Your food choices are rigid
• You label food as either good or bad
• You eat on irregular timings
• You have excessive food thoughts
• You feel guilty after eating unhealthy 

You can concern you dietitian if you think you have eating disorders, or you can try our healthy recipes to make you feel full and avoid the guilt! 

Know if you’re an emotional eater

If you feel the followings, you are may be an emotional eater :

• Getting out of control around certain foods
• Desire to eat when you have a powerful emotion, like sadness, happiness or stress
• Desire to eat when you are not actually physically hungry 
• Like to have food as a reward of something

How to stop emotional eating 

It can be very hard to stop emotional eating because it is no direct habit it comes with rather psychological factors, so it is important to first work on your psychological patterns in order to change emotional eating habit. For example if the primary cause of your emotional eating is stress, try to find another way to cope up with it, something like writing a personal emotional diary, going out and meeting a closed one to share your feelings, trying out yoga poses for stress relieve and practicing meditation at night. 

The other way to stop your emotional eating is to make your body comfortable with primary eating schedules, and eat enough that fulfils you for long. Adding protein and fiber in your diet can make you feel full for a long time which may lead you to eat less while you are snacking or actually emotionally eating.

Scheduling your meals can be very effective when it comes to control emotional eating. Scheduling can lead to make a very smooth eating patterns for you and you may feel discomfort while eating out of your schedule. 

When to seek help 

In the start you may not feel like you are an emotional eater but you have to observe yourself very clearly to know your type. In the beginning you may enjoy your eating patterns but once you start making it a habit there is no way back for its redemption. When you observe yourself to start eating with every emotion and you realise that you are gaining so much weight from your unhealthy eating patterns and you still can’t control it, it clearly means that you need a really good therapist or a dietitian to manage your emotional hunger.