Can You Recognize If You Are Emotionally Eating??

    Emotional Eating, do you think its only for overweight people? I promise its not.  Emotional eating is so much more.  Its turning to food for comfort, stress relief, or even as a reward rather than to satisfy true hunger. 

    Most emotional eaters feel powerless over their food cravings. When the urge to eat hits, it’s all you can think about.

Mindful eating is a practice that develops your awareness of eating habits and allows you to pause between your triggers and your actions. You can then change the emotional habits that have sabotaged your diet up until now.

   Ever made room for dessert even though you’re already full or dove into a pint of ice cream when you’re feeling down? Congratulations you’ve experienced emotional eating. Emotional eating is using food to make yourself feel better—eating to fill emotional needs, rather than to fill your stomach. 

   Using food every once in a while as a pick me up, a reward, or to celebrate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when eating is your primary emotional coping mechanism—when your first impulse is to open the refrigerator whenever you’re upset, angry, lonely, stressed, exhausted, or bored—you get stuck in an unhealthy cycle where the real feeling or problem is never addressed.

     Emotional hunger can’t be filled with food. Eating may feel good while its happening, but the feelings that caused the eating are still there, plus you usually feel worse than you did before because of the unnecessary calories you consumed. Than, you feel guilty for messing up and not having more willpower. Compounding the problem, you stop learning healthier ways to deal with your emotions, you have a harder and harder time controlling your weight, and you feel increasingly powerless over both food and your feelings.

Are you an emotional eater?

• Do you eat more when you’re stressed?
• Do you eat when you’re not hungry or after you already feel full?
• Do you eat to feel better (to calm and soothe yourself when you’re sad, mad, bored, anxious, etc.)?
• Do you reward yourself with food?
• Do you regularly eat until you’ve stuffed yourself?
• Does food make you feel safer? 
• Do you feel like food is a friend?
• Do you feel powerless or out of control around food?
  
  
      So now that you can recognize if you are emotionally eating, do you think its so simple as to just stop?  Sadly not the case.  Don't worry, keep following my blog, I still need to go over the differences between emotional and physical hunger, as well as tips to stop your Emotional eating and switch over to Mindful eating instead!