3 Quick Ways to Stop Emotional Eating in its Tracks?

(I’d like to first thank my Facebook friends for choosing the topic that they wanted me to write about this week! I will keep asking and you can keep voting.)

If you don’t tackle emotional eating, you’ll find yourself where I was - gaining more and more weight, overeating at every meal and for every occasion, and feeling horrible about myself for feeling my way through life with food placed nicely in the palms of my hands.

Thankfully, you can break the habit of emotional eating with these three quick tips. These tips will rewire your brain to help you identify what it is that you actually need as well as finding new ways to comfort yourself:

1. First of all, you have to know the difference between physical  and emotional hunger.

   For simplicity sake, physical hunger resides in your belly and emotional hunger resides in your head.

   When you ‘think’ you need food, you are in your head. When you are in your head and you want food, that’s emotional eating. This is the perfect opportunity to connect inward and feel what emotionally you want and need.

1. Make a love list 

   Make a list of all the things you love such as going for a walk, reading, gardening, listening to music, dancing, watching television, writing, etc.

   Take this list and place it on your fridge, with a pen dangling down from it so you add and grow your love list easily. 

   Then, before opening your fridge, check in with your body to see if you are physically or emotionally hungry.

   If you’re feeling physically hungry, open the fridge and eat whatever you'd like to eat. 

   If on the other hand you are emotionally hungry, look at your love list and go do something off of this list that you love doing. What you will find is that you will begin conditioning yourself to enjoy new fun ways to nurture your emotions without using food to do so.

1.  Try “Segment Ritual Intending”

If, let’s say you have a difficult time between 8-10 pm with late night munching, here’s what you can do:

In your mind see yourself enjoying the evening in a relaxed and fun fashion without  eating.

For example, let’s say you love watching tv and munching on chips at this time of night.

In your mind see yourself watching TV and as you’re watching TV imagine your body relaxed (practice feeling relaxed while you’re doing this exercise in your mind’s eye), imagine what you may hear, imagine what you may smell (not food but maybe a lovely candle or incense), imagine feeling loved and extremely content and joyful watching tv.

Do this three times in a row – so that you can begin to see yourself ‘intending’ a new ‘ritual’ around a difficult emotional eating time of the day.  

With each rehearsal you will start to disconnect your activities from emotional eating and as you disconnect the emotional eating, you are left with wonderful activities that you enjoy.
 

These three tips will kick your emotional eating out the window and really help you lose weight. 

Practice and enjoy.  I’d love to hear your thoughts...