How Can I End Emotional Eating

You may not have realised how emotionally attached to food you are, and that your eating habits are under emotional control and are not logical.

From being very young, you will have been brought up to associate food with being nurtured and loved.

In your earliest childhood memories you will have felt comforted with food. A crying baby screams for its bottle. As soon as it has had it, it feels calmer and happy again.

Over time your subconscious mind becomes more conditioned to associate certain foods with particular feelings. This association can become very strong!

Food is incredibly emotive. Think what you do when you want to show your appreciation to someone... A box of chocolates or a meal out is usually what springs to mind.

Eating generally makes us feel good. You eat when you are happy, but also when you are sad, stressed, angry, bored, tired and lonely.

This helps you to temporarily feel better, and is often referred to as comfort eating or emotional eating.

The problem is eating food is not supposed to be a comfort response. Eating should be your normal response to hunger.

Ending emotional eating and compulsive overeating involves re-programming yourself to eat when your body shows real physical signs of hunger and not the emotional or subconscious desire to eat.

In order to overcome emotional eating and binge eating there are several issues you will need to deal with. You must relearn how to respond only to your physical hunger.

If you are eating due to boredom or loneliness look for ways to improve your network of friends, take up a new hobby or try an evening class to give you something else to immerse yourself in. 

If being stressed or angry triggers your emotional eating then look for alternative ways to express your emotions and find other ways of dealing with the problem. Trying simple stress management techniques could be beneficial too.

There are many self help books available that can help you deal with the problems caused by eating disorders such as emotional eating and comfort eating and many people have found them useful in breaking their eating habits and helping them to lose weight.

It’s also important for you to get enough sleep as research has shown that lack of sleep makes dealing with stressful issues more difficult and emotive.

Make things easier for yourself by removing those quick fix comfort foods. If removal is not possible, putting a healthy alterative next to it will make you think twice before devouring your favourite snacks. You’ll then have the ability to make a healthy choice.

So there you have it. The permanent solution to end your emotional eating is to re-establish your true connection between your hunger and the food you eat. You will then be able to lose weight permanently and the best bit is how easy it will be.

You can learn more by registering your email address for a free copy of 'The Emotional Eater's Guide to Achieving Permanent Weight Loss' on our home page.