Emotional eating is high sometimes. It may include eating a complete chocolate bar or a bag of chips at work or some other place after a difficult day. With emotional eating, a person becomes a victim to deal with several emotions, health, life, weight, and happiness that get affected negatively. It is a stress disorder.
Fast facts:
- Emotional eating gets triggered by strong emotions or stress.
- It is psychological and physical that causes emotional eating.
- Coping strategies help people alleviate severe symptoms.
What is the relationship between your food, mood, and weight?
Stress or emotional eating refers to eating your emotions. As stress strikes, you get filled with emotions such as boredom, anger, or sadness, and your ally becomes the food. The key part is during stressful times, you choose unhealthy food, and it means your goals of weight loss are off track.
Food serves as entertainment for many people. Thus, instead of processing your emotions and situation, you choose an escapist approach to eating food in large amounts. You may like the food initially, but with your emotions returning, you get riddled with guilt. Eventually, emotions overpower in many ways your life. As you are stressed, you start eating and eat more than usual that you feel guilty, and again you end up eating more with guilt.
Tips to cope with stress eating:
Make steady and slow changes. It is never too late. Emotional or stress eating does not help, so considering changes will teach dealing with stress eating.
- Maintain a food diary- Combating stress eating is very important. Maintain a food diary and note the time you eat, what you eat, how much, and the emotions you undergo while eating. It will help in taking action and revealing certain patterns.
- Check your stress- One reason triggering eating patterns is stress. Keep a check on yourself and practice deep breathing, yoga, and meditation. Observe the disorders of eating and see the impact it has on your health.
- Tackle boredom- It is possible to eat large amounts of food during boredom. It is a form of distraction and yet is not satisfying. Inculcate habits such as listening to music, exercising, book reading, and meeting a friend.
- Check once in few hours your hunger- Checking your hunger may sound bizarre, but it helps. If you ate a few hours ago, it means you are not hungry. Yet, if you reach for a chocolate bar, it means the stress emotions are pushing you to go for it.
- Eliminate junk food- Reaching for junk food and eating it during emotional times adds to the useless weight. Stop it by not shopping for junk food.
If these tips do not help, you need professional help.