Emotional Eating?

[Pamela Zamora]

I've been dealing with this my whole life.

I am currently going through  a stressful period of my life, and I have like this automatic mind that just goes and grabs cookie, after cookie to numb the "pain", and after that I get sort of depressed, so I don't show up to life. (literally, I stop going to uni, I stop caring about myself, I stop just living) because I feel so bad for my actions, (I do workout, but my main issue is diet) then the cycle repeats, and it is like an exponential function.

Do you have any mantra, or mind game to stop my unhealthy addiction? 

[Maria M]

Hi Pamela! Please check the following segment from "mastery" book and try to get in the path of getting your feelings in alignment with your thoughts. The way is the path - instant gratification or shortcut does not exist.

"

People get hurt because of obsessive goal orientation, because they get ahead of themselves, because they lose consciousness of what's going on in their own bodies, in the here and now. The best way of achieving a goal is to be fully present. Surpassing previous limits involves negotiating with your body, not ignoring or overriding its messages. Negotiation involves awareness. Avoiding serious injury is less a matter of being cautious than of being conscious. All of this is also true to some extent of mental and emotional as well as physical injuries.

"

Edited February 12, 2016 by Maria M

[ElenaO]

I guess this might have become a habit for you - to eat whenever you are stressed. I myself have this tendency. My personal opinion is that you could look into changing this habit. What is it that you get from eating that food? Do you get stress relieve? If so, you may experiment and try to figure out what else releases the stress for you. Everyone is individual, so it's important to understand which things work specifically for you.

Another thing I would suggest is meditating. It is a solution to everything. You might not notice the effects right away, but only after some time. It will make you much more conscious about things that are happening within you.

[Seabass]

Get the junk food out of the house, buy healthy options for snacks. Ex almonds and other nuts, some sort of natural tortilla chips, protein bars, fruits, peanut butter... Et cetera and you can still be emotional ?

[Rito]

Your brain has started associating emotional surges with blood sugar levels.It is more of a psychosomatic problem.This is just a coping  mechanism,that you have developed to distract you.You have to deal with the deeper issues first.The underlying causes of your depression must be dealt with.Do some research on this and meditate,try breathing exercises.

Take some time off..a hiatus and pamper yourself more.

[Action_Junkie]

@Pamela Zamora Hi Pamela!

I suffered from the same thing for 6 years before I finally found a solution.

You can approach this problem from two levels:

First Level - Manage the stressful period of your life. There are various strategies on this but sometimes we just can't help it (common for all of us!).

Second Level - Understand how decision making and willpower works. There are two things about willpower that helped me minimise emotional eating. I've taken the following excerpt from my free online course, I think you'll find it worthwhile:

 

Quote

 

1. Understand that willpower is a limited resource

Willpower is like a muscle. Every time we're lifting weights, the willpower muscle starts fatiguing.

Let's say for instance - you're walking by the pantry but you don't really feel like having a packet of chips. The second time you walk by, you notice it again and the temptation starts to grow. The third time you walk by, you give in to your urge.

What happened was that you used your willpower muscle every time you walked away from the pantry. Every time we make a decision to against your urges, you are using the willpower muscle. And every time you use your willpower muscle, it starts to fatigue. It’s the same as constantly lifting weights at the gym to the point of fatigue.

Now here's the interesting thing:

If we reduce the number of decisions we have to make throughout the day, we can automatically reduce the amount fatigue we put our willpower muscle through!

Instead of using our willpower muscle on food decisions, we can spend it on more meaningful stuff throughout the day (like not watching another episode of the bachelor)

So how do we avoid using our willpower throughout the day?

 

2. Understand that you can let the environment make your decision for you

This is called environmental decision making.

Imagine that you're a heavy smoker and smoke twelve packets a day. But every time you smoke, you have to go to your front balcony so the smoke doesn't fill your apartment.

Imagine now, that you decide to reorganise your room so there is a sofa in front of the balcony door.

And the sofa is placed in such a way that you have to use a fair bit of effort to move the sofa to get to the balcony.

What happens now whenever you feel like smoking?

You'll look at the sofa and you'll ask yourself - "can I really be bothered moving the sofa?"

All of a sudden, you actually need willpower for every time you smoke. So now you’re using the willpower principle by designing your environment.

The point of this imaginative exercise was to realise that small changes we make to our environment can have a significant impact towards changing our habit conditioning.

 

 

I applied the above in my lifestyle by having a rule of not storing chocolates in our home pantry. Everytime I felt like having chocolate, I was allowed to have it as long as I drove down to the local supermarket and eat it in the car park. You can imagine that I rarely ever had the willpower to do that all that work for a piece of chocolate.

I hope this gives you inspiration to come up with your own environment design rule

Kern