Emotional Eating & Me

Yes, I still struggle with emotional eating and have resolved myself to the fact that this is a life long journey. Life is a long time and it is very easy to fall off the wagon, so the question of my lifetime is what can I do to help me curb my emotional eating? I’d like to share some ideas I have read about, heard about and tried out myself. Here goes…

Nutritional coaches advice keeping an eating diary; they say it helps keep you accountable, more conscious of what goes into your mouth and possibly help you identify your triggers. To be frank, I have tried this a couple of times but I can never seem to sustain my effort for more than one week. So I may need more convincing, that is not to say that other people have enjoyed some success using this method to track and curb emotional eating; so it may be worth a try to see if it is for you. 

I have personally found that I tend to nibble less when I work out early in the morning – nothing major, just a brisk 45 minute walk around my neighborhood. I don’t know the science of it, but I think it has to do with physical activity releasing endorphins that lift my mood all through the day – so I don’t get into the emotional funk that portends bouts of eating excessively when I am not hungry.

Last week someone commented that when she goes out with a lot of cash on her person, it’s easier for her to ‘fall off the wagon’ and buy things that are not good for her and fuel her eating. This may seem simplistic to many, but thinking about it, it made total sense to me. I actually have made a new month resolution to limit the cash I carry around and so doing see if I can stop myself from buying those little bits that I nibble on - chocolates, glazed nuts, pastries… Thanks Modupe for your comment! Will tell you all how this goes.

I read an blog by some coach a while ago (sorry can’t recall the site), and what this lady was saying is that daily relaxation can help balance your mood hormones (like serotonin) and help manage depression, fatigue etc which could trigger bouts of emotional eating or binging. This makes total sense to me, so I gave it a try – one key initial outcome from this was that I found out that I didn’t know how to relax. Seriously, I had to go learn how to relax. I started out with deep breathing (no, I didn’t go ‘ohmmmm’ J) – I just lay on my back in bed, and took a deep breath in, counted for a few seconds, then released the breath. The first day I did this, I feel asleep…don’t laugh! I was happy to fall asleep. So now this is a major way I ease stress. Relaxation is now a major part of my life and to achieve this I swim, I work out, Jack Canfield’s Mirror exercise (basically self-talk to myself looking at my image in the mirror) – do what works for you, coz stress is one thing I know that triggers emotional eating in many of us.

 

There are so many ways to curb emotional eating, and different things work for different people so this blog post can go on and on. But I’ll stop at this last point today: Get enough sleep. I read an online help guide (www.helpguide.org) recently that advised that not getting enough sleep amplifies our cravings and the lack of sleep make us less able to turn away from unhelpful cravings. How many hours sleep do you get each night? If you consistently sleep less than at least 7-8hours each night, you are getting too little sleep. Don’t be sad – I previously lived on less than 5 hours sleep each night and thought I was being smart, I didn’t know that I was compromising my health and weight loss. So now [most nights] I turn in by 10pm (I’ll probably fall asleep by about 11 after my nighttime routines) and get up by 6am. This is the norm – although sometimes I will sleep later or wake up earlier, but these days are the exception and not the rule.

So, far so good – I’ve maintained my weight loss for over a year, it’s not as fast as when I first started but I am healthier than I have ever been. I think lifestyle changes also help in our bid to lose weight and live healthy – not just dieting or deprivation.

What is your emotional eating story?

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