Emotional eating is the action of eating in response to emotions. This behaviour includes eating in response to both positive and negative feelings. One of the biggest steps in overcoming emotional eating is learning to tell the difference between emotional vs physical hunger.
Physical Eating
- Grows slowly.
- Satisfied by any food.
- Goes away when you’ve eaten enough.
- Feel better after eating.
Emotional
- Comes on suddenly.
- Craving for one specific food.
- Still hungry, even after eating.
- Feel worse after eating.
Here are a few tips to overcome emotional eating :
- Take Five – Wait for a few minutes to see if the hunger fades or subsides. Cravings are often short lived.
- Write it Down – Keep a food diary to track what and when you eat. You can also track how you feel.
- Toss Temptation – Stop buying your go-to comfort foods. It’s easier to say no to junk food if it’s not easily available.
- Get Distracted – Take a walk, call a friend or play on your phone. Many times the acute craving will pass.
- Plan to Snack – Set yourself up for success by avoiding extreme hunger. Plan 1-2 healthy snacks per day.
Reference : https://cdn.phentermine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Overcoming-Emotional-Eating.png
Great post
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Thank you !!!
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Thank you
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Great post! It is so hard not to emotionally eat. Haha. I even crave certain foods depending on the weather, but the tip you included of Tossing temptation is something I have to work on! Maybe I can find healthier alternatives. Haha
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Here is another suggestion for you : Meditation. Countless studies show that meditation reduces stress, although much of the research has focused on high blood pressure and heart disease. Meditation may also help people become more mindful of food choices. With practice, a person may be able to pay better attention to the impulse to grab a fat- and sugar-loaded comfort food and inhibit the impulse.
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I find that not limiting myself to certain foods allows me not to indulge (sugars)
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Makes sense!!
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true! But I have to say that pizza does look yummy 🤷🏽♂️
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Hahah it does !!!!!!
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Your tips are right on. I have practiced all five of these, and they definitely build a foundation for a healthy lifestyle.
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Great!!! Emotional eating is using food to make yourself feel better—to fill emotional needs, rather than your stomach. Unfortunately, emotional eating doesn’t fix emotional problems. In fact, it usually makes you feel worse. Afterward, not only does the original emotional issue remain, but you also feel guilty for overeating.
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Wow.. Good article.. So true. Need to get that in control .
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Emotional eating is eating as a way to suppress or soothe negative emotions, such as stress, anger, fear, boredom, sadness and loneliness. Major life events or, more commonly, the hassles of daily life can trigger negative emotions that lead to emotional eating and disrupt your weight-loss efforts. Glad you liked the article.
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Gluttony is real until an individual realises it conciously.
Few years back a colleague’s impromptu comment on our common friend, “He is living for eating and we all eat for living”, made me realise few important things in life.
Eat what you need while you can, else when you can’t you get to eat none.
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That entirely is a personal choice. Habitual of eating tasty food, mostly overeats out of taste. As a result food is not properly digested leading to a lot of toxins being created. Suffers from one or the other health problem, work suffers and so does productivity. Inefficieny leads to frustration and social enmity with performing peers. Inactivity, lethargy and bad health hampers cultivating and building hobbies. Life is stressful and there is lack of self-contentment.
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These is really great 🤩 and Amazing tips 🙂 by the way please visit in my page as well
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Hey, the part about eating in response to positive emotion was enlightening. I never considered that before but it has been a big light bulb moment! i’d always just thought about comfort eating through negativity, but it’s equally as dangerous the other way too!
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A recent study found that happiness can also encourage us to overeat. Researchers in the Netherlands found that students consumed more calories when watching a movie that prompted happy emotions than they did when watching things that prompted either neutral or negative emotions. The researchers published their findings in the journal Appetite: “Most emotional eating is related to negative moods. However, volunteers did not overeat in response to negative emotions but did overeat in response to positive ones. These findings could be of value for the treatment of obesity. They underline the importance of positive emotions on overeating, which are often overlooked.”
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Absolutely fascinating and obvious now I think about it! It can also be linked to other damaging habits that are also usually exclusively linked to negative emotions – like drug habits or toxic relationships. I guess that mediating our emotions is key in making smart decisions.
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You can’t control your emotions with a dial (if only it were that easy!). But imagine, for a moment, that you could manage emotions this way. You wouldn’t want to leave them running at maximum all the time. You also wouldn’t want to switch them off entirely, either. When you suppress or repress emotions, you’re preventing yourself from experiencing and expressing feelings. This can happen consciously (suppression) or unconsciously (repression). When learning to exercise control over emotions, make sure you aren’t just sweeping them under the rug. Healthy emotional expression involves finding some balance between overwhelming emotions and no emotions at all.
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This is a challenge that many of us face regularly
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But you can overcome
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I have come to the realization that I’m an emotional eater. Thank a for the tips. I think removing yourself from the situation like taking a walk is a good idea. I also blog about better ways to start taking care of your self would love if you stopped by.
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Distraction is a one of the effective methods to overcome emotional eating. Also another one is drinking water, whenever you feel like eating anything first drink a glass of water.
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Definitely will do. Thanks for the tips! 👍
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Most welcome.
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Really helpful post 💪🏽 thank you
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Glad you liked the post. I think most of us during this lockdown period eat out of boredom. Fight boredom. Instead of snacking when you’re not hungry, distract yourself and substitute a healthier behavior. Take a walk, watch a movie, play with your cat, listen to music, read, surf the internet or call a friend.
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I see emotional eating in my clients all the time. I think we all have moments of emotional eating, some people just struggle with being consistent.
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The use of food for emotional comfort is often normalized in our culture. It’s very common to see TV shows or movies portraying actresses drowning their sorrows after a breakup by eating a tub of ice cream or an entire box of chocolates. That tells us that it’s acceptable to use food to cope with difficult emotions. For some people, that may be effective and not seem problematic, but it’s far more complicated for someone with an eating disorder.
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Great
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Psychologically, emotional eating is harmful because you become emotionally dependent on food. It can literally become an addiction. And as long as you are actively living an addiction, the original emotional triggers continue to dangle in front of you.
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This is what happened to me today! I got stressed about something at work, and I IMMEDIATELY grabbed popcorn and chocolate. If only I took five minutes to step away, I bet I would have resisted.
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In our culture, we learn from a young age to avoid things that feel bad. Unfortunately, the ways we have found to distract ourselves from difficult feelings are not always in our best interests. Without the ability to tolerate experiencing life’s inevitable yucky feelings, you’re susceptible to emotional eating. The solution? Practice letting yourself experience difficult feelings. I know, much easier said than done! I know you don’t like feeling mad, sad, rejected, and bored. And people often ask me, “What’s the point in feeling mad? It doesn’t change anything.” Well, it may not change the source of your anger, but it will prevent you from having to blunt your feelings with behaviors you’d like to stop — like eating.
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You’re so right! I just need to allow myself to feel whatever emotion it is and then let it pass.
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Yes we need a lot of strength and courage to do that. But nothing is impossible. Take care 🙂
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Awesome post! this is definitely a topic I’d love to learn more about!
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Emotional eating can be a direct result of not being conscious of what or why you’re eating. Therapists call this unconscious eating. Unconscious eating is when you’re done with your meal, and you continue to pick at it, slowly eating the remaining portion that you intended to leave behind. It can also be putting peanuts or crackers or any other food in your mouth, just because it’s in front of you. The solution? Try to remain mindful of what and when you are eating. I know it can be tedious to focus completely on your eating, especially at first! Start slowly and avoid self-judgment as you try out a new way of being.
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I luv this! thanks for the info… I hope you could follow my site too, Let’s follow each other😊
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Sure Christine.
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This post has been at the top of my discover for almost 14 days now. Is their a way to get fresher content? 🤷♂️
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Wow..I write 5 fresh posts everyday. Where are you?
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I don’t know honestly WordPress shows me the same 5 or 6 posts in my discover at a time. I write to posts a week about kettle training alone. I search for posts about kettlebells and I get ones from 6 months ago…
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Hmm check your settings…also you may want to follow more people…actually this post is getting a lot of comments..and every time someone comments it is shown at the top.
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You got a person eating pizza on the couch that appeals to everyone! 😃 Yeah it’s not your fault I’m not that impressed with the WordPress discover option are their other apps to search blog posts? This thing seems to use the same software as Yahoo in 1998.
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Wow that’s ancient
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Yerp, pre spiders just a list.
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Haha
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Wow now it says no new posts… and gives me nothing. It’s like they got mad at me for talking about it and shut me off entirely.
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Haha well that is a possibility
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Really useful information.
I find having a glass of water is a good distraction as well ass a test – do I still want that food after a drink of water? Sometimes I can do without.
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Take time to drink that one glass of water. Sit down, make sure the water is either normal temperature or lukewarm..drink slowly, no bottoms up!!
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I’ve been doing a lot of emotional eating over the last year and a half and I have gained 32 pounds. lol😀
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Research studies have estimated that emotional eating may be a significant contributor or cause of overeating as much as 88 per cent of the time. Overeating of such energy-dense foods for emotional reasons has been cited as a major contributor to the type 2 diabetes and obesity epidemic. It would be a good time to seek help.
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❤️❤️✨✨
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Glad you liked the post Ghazala. Most of us are guilty of emotional eating
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Nice post dear..it is helpful
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Glad you found it helpful. Emotional eating is very harmful. Psychologically, emotional eating is harmful because you become emotionally dependent on food. It can literally become an addiction. And as long as you are actively living an addiction, the original emotional triggers continue to dangle in front of you.
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Thanks for liking my blog!
Also, I would have to say that I never had this problem with eating. I always wait until I’m hungry before I eat. Worked well for me so far.
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Yes that is a good way of preventing emotional eating
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