Top 9 Tips To Help You Cope With Emotional Eating
An emotional eater is someone who struggles to eat under normal circumstances and becomes preoccupied with food in order to deal with their emotions. Emotional eating can be a serious problem, but there are ways you can get help. Coping with emotional eating can be difficult to deal with, but we have put together these top 9 tips that can help you cope with your emotional eating issues and help you stop from falling into this downward spiral of overindulging when you're down.
1.Get support
Getting support is a great way to cope with emotional eating. If you're trying to break a habit of emotional eating or lose weight, it can be helpful to have someone to talk to who can give you encouragement and advice. A therapist or dietitian can help you develop strategies for controlling your urges and making healthy choices.
Some people also find it helpful to talk about their struggles with friends or family members who are supportive. When we feel alone with our problems, it can be harder to make changes. But when we have people in our lives who care about us and want the best for us, it becomes easier for us to take steps toward better health.
2.Tame your stress
Stress is a normal part of life. It can make us feel anxious, sad or angry, and it's not uncommon for us to experience stressors in our everyday lives. But there's a difference between dealing with stress and letting stress control us.
When we’re overpowered by stress, it can cause us to eat more food than we normally would under regular circumstances, which is what we call emotional eating. Emotional eating is when you eat something that makes you feel better after you've experienced some sort of emotional event—like dealing with a stressful situation at work or home.
You may have heard some tips like “Just go out and get a snack,” or “Eat your feelings.” These are okay strategies to deal with stress but when it becomes too much, that makes it bad. That’s why, one of the things we can do is to manage our stress, not the other way around.
3.Keep a food diary
It can be difficult to remember what you ate when you're feeling anxious or upset. But if you're able to write down what you ate, it's easier to see the patterns in your eating, and it becomes easier to change them.
Keeping a food diary has many benefits. First, it's a good way to track what you eat, how much you eat, and how that relates to your weight. Second, it can also help you make better decisions about what foods to eat and when.
More importantly, it can help you deal with emotional eating. Emotional eating is when someone eats in response to emotional stressors rather than hunger pains. It's been linked to more than 30 different psychological disorders, including depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. But if you're trying to manage emotional eating without the help of medication or therapy, keeping a food diary can help!
4.Fight boredom
One of the biggest reasons for emotional eating is boredom. If you find yourself mindlessly snacking on sweets and chips throughout the day, it might be because you're bored and unfocused.
You can do this by keeping your hands busy. If you can't stop thinking about food, put down the remote control or the book and do something with your hands. Knitting, drawing, painting and other crafts can help keep your mind off what's in the pantry.
You can also go for a walk outside or ride your bike around town, just get moving! This will also help burn off some calories, which will help keep you fit and healthy.
Aside from that, take up a new hobby that engages both your hands and mind — learn how to knit or crochet, take up photography or even write poetry — whatever interests you! The most important thing is to make sure that this can help you fight against boredom.
5.Have a hungry reality check
A hungry reality check is a quick way to get back to your body and what it needs at any given moment. It's a way to remind yourself that your need for food isn't an emotional problem, but rather a physical one.
When you start feeling like you're in the middle of an emotional eating episode, take three deep breaths and ask yourself if you're actually hungry. If not, then stop eating and distract yourself with something else until the urge passes.
If you are hungry, eat! Don't wait until later or try to ignore the feelings, just keep doing whatever else is important until dinner time rolls around. Once dinner comes around, take another three deep breaths before digging in so that you make sure this is really about hunger rather than stress, boredom,anxiety,frustration or anything else that might be getting in the way of your brain sending signals about when it needs food.
6.Take away temptation
The very first thing you should do is to avoid tempting foods. This is important if you have a sweet tooth, as it’s easy to get sidetracked by cookies, cakes and other treats. Make sure all junk food items are out of sight and out of mind, even if they’re in the pantry or freezer. If they aren’t there, you won’t be tempted to eat them.
Another is to avoid going into the kitchen when you’re hungry — especially after drinking alcohol, which makes people want to eat more than usual. The kitchen is where most people keep their junk food, so it’s also where you are most likely to give in to temptation when you're hungry or drunk!
Rather keep healthy food handy. Keep fresh fruit and vegetables around at all times to nibble on when you feel the urge for something salty or sweet. Also try keeping nuts or popcorn around for snacking instead of chips — preferably unsalted ones!
7. Snack healthy
Eating healthy snacks is one of the best ways to avoid emotional eating. When your blood sugar drops, you may feel a strong urge to eat something sweet. But if you’re eating a healthy snack, you can still satisfy your craving for something sweet without eating junk food.
You can do this by making sure there are healthy options in your house at all times. That way, when you get hungry, you can grab something nutritious instead of heading to the pantry or fridge and grabbing whatever is there.
More importantly, choose foods that take longer to digest and leave you feeling satisfied longer after eating them (like whole-grain crackers and nuts). These foods also keep your blood sugar stable so they won't trigger cravings as quickly as foods high in sugar or fat do.
8. Don't deprive yourself
We know that emotional eating can be a real problem for many people, especially when it comes to dealing with stress and anxiety. But here's the thing, you don't have to deprive yourself of the foods you love in order to deal with these issues.
Instead, try eating regularly and mindfully. Make sure that the food you're eating is nutritious and healthy. You should also not go overboard on portions (eating for emotional reasons can lead to overeating). And if something comes up during the day when you're hungry? Eat some fruit! Your body needs fuel and nutrition as much as it needs love, kindness, and respect.
9.Learn from setbacks
Learning from setbacks is important to your emotional health. If you're having a tough time adjusting to life, it's natural to feel like you'll never be able to handle anything new or difficult. That's why it's important to remember that setbacks are just life's way of helping you grow and develop.
The first step in learning from a setback is being able to recognize it for what it is. Most of the time, setbacks are caused by a change in circumstances—a new job, a move back home, or something else that could potentially be considered stressful. But sometimes, especially when we're dealing with emotional eating as a coping mechanism, we might confuse our setbacks with something else entirely.
If this sounds like something you're struggling with, take some time out from eating and talk with your doctor about how they can help you cope better with stressful situations.
The cycle of emotional eating can be hard to break. More than anything, it's important to remind yourself that feelings are temporary, and that many often pass without acting on them. You may not be able to avoid every stressful situation, but you can keep yourself from falling prey to your emotions by developing some good coping mechanisms beforehand.
For more helpful and informative insights, visit here.
