Do you fall victim to emotional eating?

Today I want to offer some value on a topic that a lot of people tend to struggle with, especially these days — emotional eating.

Here’s what NOT to do:

— Restrict more.
— Feel guilty.
— Try to ‘compensate’ or ‘burn it off’.
— Extra cardio as ‘punishment’.
— Ignore and act like it won’t happen again.

The reality is that doing any of the above is only going to make the situation a lot worse for you.

Restricting food or trying to compensate with additional exercise not only won’t help the situation and work against you in the long run, it’s making your relationship with food, exercise and yourself even worse and promoting a binge restrict cycle.

Feeling guilty like you’ve done something bad doesn’t make things better. If you’re already emotional eating, throwing guilt on top of that out of context is a recipe for disaster.

You MUST remember that food is not something to feel guilty about…

Here are some tips to help you better handle emotional eating:

— Don’t hide from the negative emotions and allow yourself to feel them.
— When the desire to emotionally eat hits, replace eating with journalling, mindful breathing or going on a short walk.
— Practise mindful eating. Take 15 minutes over each meal and be present. Avoid phones, screens or work distractions.
— Be aware of your triggers and avoid meal prepping, food shopping or snacking when stressed / sad / lonely / angry etc.

The truth with emotional eating is that you are doing it to get your mind off and not feel negative emotions and provide the body with a dopamine hit from food to boost mood.

But imagine if you were doing this with drugs or alcohol to not feel. You wouldn’t be so quick to let that fly…

The same goes with food and emotional eating. The more we suppress and push away negative feelings, the more they stay and get even bigger.

People often use things like…

— Food.
— Drugs.
— Alcohol.
— Working out.
— Staying busy.
— Work.

… to not feel what’s inside and hide from it.

This is dangerous because then these become subconscious patterns that you do on autopilot to avoid feeling.

Allow yourself the time and space to feel and keep working on becoming more self aware.

#TeamInfluence