Many weight watchers say they are emotional eaters. Emotional eating means eating which is not caused by hunger but by our emotions. Eating can be used as a way to cope with our (usually negative) feelings: sadness, loneliness, anxiousness, anger, PMS symptoms or just boredom. Emotional eating is the cause of many people gaining weight and many diets failing. The dieters do not notice the connection between their feelings and their eating habits, or if they do, they do not know what to do about it.
Emotional eating is a learned reaction, but it has a biological background, which makes it very understandable. It has been shown that different neurotransmitters in the brain are produced from components of certain foods. For example foods high in carbohydrates increase the amounts of serotonin, which has a calming and anxiety-reducing effect on us. The levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, which enhance concentration and alertness, are increased by the consumption of protein-rich foods. Chocolate deserves to be mentioned here too: it boosts the release of serotonin and endorphin, which can produce feelings of euphoria.
Eating as a main way of coping with negative feelings will most likely lead to weight gain and lead you to look for tips on how to lose weight because of three reasons:
1. The effects of emotional eating are short-term. Eating does not solve your problems, it just helps coping with them for a moment. Soon you will do it again if you cannot figure out what is wrong or what to do about it.
2. Emotional eating is often binge eating and continues until you start feeling nauseous or run out of treats.
3. The foods eaten for emotional reasons are often super high in carbohydrates (i.e. sugar).
It is true that many people fall into the emotional eating category, but before you start fixing the problem, you need to know what it is. Your interpretation of the situation will affect the measures you take to solve the issue. The first thing to do is to find out if you are really dealing with emotional eating or if you are snacking because of being hungry but not aware of it. Are you an emotional eater or just starving? Start listening to your body and work towards intuitive eating, which means letting your appetite control your eating. Learn to know the feeling of hunger.
Once you have made sure that you are eating enough every day, you can take another look into your eating habits. Is the problem still there? If the answer is no, you can be happy and proud. You solved your problem by changing your eating habits. If the answer is yes, we need to look further to find out what is going on and if the problem really has to do with the emotional eating disorder.
If you have been following the advices on this website, you are are already familiar with using a food diary to count your daily calorie requirement. Now you need to start thinking of your eating from a different perspective. You have to find out what exactly it is that makes you eat, and that can be done by adding some information to your food diary. The purpose is to see if there are any patterns in your eating habits.
These are the things to consider when trying to figure out if you have an emotional eating disorder:
Day and time
Place
Situation
How did you feel before eating
Food consumed
How did you feel during eating
How did you feel after eating
Keep the diary for at least one or two weeks. Be honest and don’t leave anything out! It is not nice to actually write down everything you eat, but it is extremely important for getting a real picture of the situation. Can you see patterns forming after a while? Do you binge eat at a certain time or perhaps when going to a certain place or before meeting certain people? Does some situation make you want to eat? Are some of your feelings associated with binge eating? How did you feel during eating? How did eating change the feeling you had before eating? If you are having trouble finding any patterns, showing your diary to a close friend or a relative can help. It can be difficult to assess your own behavior.
Understanding the situation is the first step towards changing it. Breaking free from emotional eating is important, but it can be hard to overcome by yourself. When you become conscious about the feelings or situations which lead to you eating when you are not hungry, you can try to become aware of them and then address them in a more suitable manner. A philosophy called intuitive eating might be an useful approach. If you feel helpless with the problem, it is best to seek professional guidance. Your condition is treatable and overcoming binge eating it is definitely possible once you get some help. Dialectical behavior therapy is one of the top treatments for emotional eating.
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