March 29, 2024

Emotional eating is a big issue for a lot of people and I have written a lot about it before. Here is an article from MSNBC in whihc nutritionist Joy Bauer tells us exactly what you can do to at least curb your emotional eating.

If you find yourself regularly eating in response to emotions, try to break the habit with some of my strategies below.

Learn to recognize your hunger

Before you automatically pop something into your mouth.  Rate your hunger on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being ravenous and 5 being full. Make every effort to avoid eating when you’re a 4 or a 5. Alos do not eat until you are full but instead eat only until you are satisfied.

Find alternatives to eating

Prepare a list of activities that are personally appealing and handy. Perhaps go for a walk, call a friend, listen to nostalgic music (anything that brings you back to a happy time), take a hot shower or bath, clean your house, polish your nails, surf the Internet, schedule outstanding appointments, watch something on TiVo, clean your purse, organize your closet, look through a photo album, etc.

Keep a food journal

Logging your food will help to identify your toughest timeframes. It will also make you accountable, so perhaps you’ll be less apt to reach for unnecessary food. A fitness journal is the first step to taking bakc your eating and exercising so that you are accountable and make better decisions.

Three-food interference

Make the commitment to first eat three specific healthy foods before starting on comfort foods (i.e., an apple, handful of baby carrots and a nonfat yogurt). If after that, you still want to continue with your comfort foods, give yourself permission. However, most of the time, the three foods are enough to stop you from moving on.

Exercise regularly

Daily exercise relieves stress and puts you in a positive mindset, which provides greater strength to pass on the unhealthy fare.  Exercise will raise your metabolism as well as giving yourself another outlet to your emotions.

Get enough sleep

Research shows that sleep deprivation can increase hunger by decreasing leptin levels, the appetite-regulating hormone that signals fullness. Furthermore, with adequate sleep, you’ll be less tired and have more resolve to fight off the urge to grab foods for comfort.

In looking at this list I think that you can break down all of your emotional eating to being in control of putting things in your mouth. By control I mean that you make a deliberate action to eat for sustenance and not to make you feel better.

2 thoughts on “How to stop emotional eating

  1. Great tips! I have a bad habit of eating whenever I’m bored, which may be a little different from emotional eating. Still, it takes a lot of self-control to walk pass the chips, cookies, ice cream, soda, etc.

  2. nice tips! another thing we must have is willpower. Those tips are simple action, but if we don’t have great willpower, still we will fail.

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