The fundamental act of nourishing our bodies with food happens day in and day out, through sad and happy times, stressful moments and joyous celebrations. Often food is interconnected with our feelings, even used to mark important emotional occasions. What would your birthday be without cake, or Thanksgiving without turkey? And for most of us, food has been a comfort or a pleasure to us at an emotional time. If it's nearly impossible to separate food from emotional events, how can we ever take the emotion out of eating? The good news is that we don't have to stop taking pleasure in food to gain control over emotional eating habits. We need to be mindful of ourselves and where our true hunger lies.
One key to controlling emotional eating is to understand exactly how food affects your body. Each time we eat a food that's pleasing to us (sugar and chocolate are at the top of this list with major habit-forming qualities), the body produces natural opiates like serotonin and endorphins that leave us feeling euphoric. To reproduce that feeling we return to these foods again and again. Typically, emotional eaters seek an outlet for feelings of hopelessness, fear, anger, lack of control and even boredom. When food becomes that outlet, a pattern of emotional eating can begin that lasts days, months- even a lifetime. Hunger, in a physical sense, is often completely separate from the emotional hunger that emotional eaters experience. A struggle with emotional eating can lead to further depression and fatigue, as well as overeating in general. In fact, experts estimate that 75 percent of overeating is caused by emotions. Before you turn to the kitchen or the vending machine for a release, make a commitment to apply one or more of these techniques that can help you regain control of the moment:
Quiet the Impulse When you feel an impulse to eat or an intense craving outside of meal times, wait ten minutes to and see if the feeling passes. Putting just a few extra minutes between you and your desire to eat helps to separate emotion from true hunger.
Change Your Taste After eating a meal, brush your teeth and use a tongue scraper. With a fresh flavor in your mouth, and food residue gone from your tongue, you are much less likely to crave a new meal.
Eat at Regular Intervals Try setting regular times for your meals, and stay vigilant to that regimen even when you feel the sudden need to eat. Over time you will develop new ways of dealing with stress, such as meditation or taking a walk, that will carry you through the moments when food is absent.
Keep a Journal Each day, write down what you eat, the time you eat it and how you feel at that moment. Looking back at your journal may help you to connect particular foods with emotions and result in greater mindfulness about the quantity and quality of your daily nourishment.
Call on a Friend Find someone you trust to keep you accountable for your food decisions during the day. This may be a family member or a friend who is also working to control emotional eating. You might even Twitter your food choices, via tweetwhatyoueat.com. The site keeps your information in a virtual diary, and your tweets are out there for all to see!
Overall, be gentle with yourself and your body. Examine the source of your emotions with close attention to your feelings and experiment with different ways that your emotional needs can be met without food. Understand that food sends chemical signals to your brain that may be masking other issues at hand. And take pleasure in feeding your body healthy foods in the right amounts for you.
