If you turn to food for comfort, your not alone. Emotional eating is a common problem among women, but there are things you can do to stop that habit.
Miki Eberhardt shares five strategies that will help you stop eating your feelings.
Find more healthy tips from Miki at www.axum.co.
Stop Emotional Eating
When you’re stressed or depressed, food can be the easiest, but maybe not healthiest, way to find comfort. These five steps will help you break that habit.
1. Keep a Journal
Use a hunger scale from 1-10, 1 being starving and 10 being painfully full. Write down where you are when you start eating and where you are when you finish. Make note of how you’re feeling during that time. Are you feeling lonely or angry? Track those patterns to make the food to mood connection, to then create solutions.
2. Tame Your Stress
Meditate, exercise, do yoga, read a book, whatever you need to do to de-stress. Visualize a squeegee. Take a deep breath, and as you exhale, visualize taking a squeegee from the top of your head all the way down and get rid of all the feelings of worry and anxiety.
3. Honor Your Hunger
Honor both emotional and physical hunger. When you start to feel the signs of hunger (tired, grumpy, headaches, etc), respect it and provide your body with nourishment. On the emotional side, if you’re feeling sad or lonely, you may not need food, you may just need a connection.
4. Distract Yourself
If you’re at a five on the scale and searching for food, put a note on the fridge or pantry with a list of five things you could do instead. Make sure they are things you would actually do, like get the mail, call a friend, etc.
5. Don’t Deprive Yourself
Chronic under-eating will only make you crave food more. During times of high emotional stress, those cravings will be amplified even more.
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