Emotional eating– Awareness, Responsibility, Choice

How do you break the vicious circle of using food to repress emotions and then needing more food to repress even more accumulated emotions?

These three simple, yet infinitely powerful friends will help you on your journey out of emotional eating.

Awareness.

First and foremost, awareness.

Be aware of the fact that you’re eating for an emotional reason. When you notice the sensations that lead you to eating, before you run to the plate, stay with those emotions a little longer. Let yourself feel them, even if they’re not pleasant.

Tending to avoid unpleasant situations is exactly what brings you into that cycle of eating.

So, before you dash off to grab a bite of something – stay with the emotion. Start to breathe, slowly and carefully.

Stay with the unpleasant emotion – anxiety, fear, depression, sadness.

Remember that food won’t make the emotion disappear. Food will only suppress the emotion for a few more minutes.

Responsibility.

Forget the reasons and excuses and legitimate explanations for everything that was done to you as a child. Put aside your history and everything

you’ve experienced.

And now we get to the stage of taking responsibility. No matter what eating habits you started out from, you can change them. You really can.

Choice

And this is precisely where choice comes into play. You can choose to do things differently. I recommend that you sit and write down the things that come into your mind when you want to eat. I don’t mean eat for hunger’s sake, but in those moments when you know food is an emotional response;

I want to ask you to stop for a moment, sit quietly, write, record the emotions you’re feeling, the sensations, the thoughts.

What it is that makes you want to eat.

Once you’ve finished writing, you can make your choice: to go and eat, or not. Very often the choice is to forego the eating.

But even if you do eat, you’ll still be benefiting. That’s because you’ve turned an automatic unconscious behavior into an aware one. You’ve

turned an ingrained habit into a conscious choice. You control the food, and not the other way around.

And most of all, you’ve become aware of the emotions you bring to eating, instead of repressing those emotions into dark places where they can hide.

You’ve allowed yourself to experience the difficulty, and over time you’ll feel less and less need of eating as your mechanism of suppression.

Each time you start feeling this stirring of emotions in your stomach and automatically think about food, re member Joan of ARC (Awareness,

Responsibility and Choice). Just gently ask yourself: “What am I really needing now? Is it really food?”, and give it to yourself, with love, appreciation and care.

What is emotional eating

Emotional eating is when you use food to cope with emotional stress rather than to satisfy hunger. This type of eating can lead to overeating, weight gain, and negative health consequences. People who engage in emotional eating may turn to food as a source of comfort or distraction from negative emotions such as anxiety, depression, boredom, or loneliness.

How to identify emotional eating

These signs that can help you identify emotional eating:

• Eating in response to emotions rather than physical hunger – You may eat when you’re not hungry or continue to eat even after you’re full.
• Eating in secret or hiding food – You may feel ashamed or guilty about your eating habits and try to hide your food or eat in secret.
• Eating to cope with negative emotions – You may turn to food as a way to cope with stress, anxiety, depression, boredom, or loneliness.
• Eating large amounts of food quickly – Emotional eating often involves eating large amounts of food in a short period of time.
• Feeling a loss of control over eating – You may feel like you can’t stop eating or that your eating habits are out of control.
• Using food as a reward – You may use food as a way to celebrate or reward yourself, even if you’re not hungry.

By Liat Ben Yakov

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