Emotional Eating

Emotional Eating

Factors such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, night eating and mindless eating can affect a person’s ability to control how much food they consume and maintaining a healthy weight. People being overweight or obese have reached such high levels it is now an epidemic. Being overweight comes with many health risks, such as:

Excess weight on the body can cause strain on our vital organs of body, most importantly the heart
Increased risk of cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, respiratory disease, type II diabetes and some cancers
Excess weight can be strain on our joints like the hips, back and knees
Risk of developing osteoarthritis which is a degenerative joint disease
Increased risk of complications during and after surgery which can lead to death

Emotional Eating is not something that many of us realise we are even doing. This is also often referred to as stress eating and we use food to make ourselves feel better; usually overeating or eating unhealthy food as comfort.

As we often eat past the point of satisfying our hunger and are still eating because it satisfies an emotional need.

Most of this emotional eating will happen subconsciously to help us deal with a suppressed emotion and the remainder of the time we know it’s when we are upset or happy and reach for comfort food.

Your plan to try a new diet fails again as you turn to food to comfort our emotional needs. Guess what? Many of us feel even worse emotionally eating; you will feel so guilty for overeating and the emotion will remain.

You can make a positive change and find healthier ways of dealing with emotions and gain control of your weight.

Here are some steps to help you keep track of your emotional eating:

Be mindful I have covered this in a previous blog; this is about being mindful of what we are doing when we are around food. If you feel hungry, determine if you are actually hungry. Drink a glass of water and wait 10 minutes, if you are still hungry ask yourself some questions. Stop for a moment; ask yourself how long it has been since you last ate? Is there an emotion or craving associated with the hunger? Start to notice your food triggers with your emotions. Just tell yourself to wait and check in with yourself. When you do eat, do so mindfully, paying attention so you stop eating before you are full/overeat.
Keep a journal This is about being aware of our emotions to determine when you stress eat. What patterns are you noticing? Keep a journal of when you want to eat and how you felt, also when you do eat and use a scale of 1-10 of how hungry you actually were. This helps you identify your emotional triggers, such as: stress, dealing with uncomfortable or unhappy emotions, boredom, habit and social influences. This helps us realise subconsciously when we are emotionally eating and changing behaviours.
Replace Instead of eating as a reward or when you are craving, reward yourself with another activity and replace eating. -You can sip tea which helps drop your cortisol levels and stress. -Do some deep breathing exercises or meditation to relax your body -Complete another activity like; write an email or message, talk to a friend, read a book or magazine, listen to music, go for a walk, do some housework or concentrate on your work day and what you are completing.
Accept your feelings Telling yourself to wait when you are hungry, learning to confront your feelings can be scary while you postpone reaching for food. Once you deal with the emotion, it will subside fairly quickly and that emotion will lose its power over you and your attention. Now you are becoming mindful of your emotions and your triggers. Most importantly (and I have mentioned this many times before), don’t beat yourself up if you fail and give into temptations. Try again and make commitment to yourself to slowly try and change your behaviours. If you fail, try again until you succeed. No one is telling you to give up food! While it is essential for life, let’s face it; most food tastes amazing! They more you adjust your behaviour and attitude towards food the better you will feel. You can enjoy your food you are eating without feeling guilty of eating bad food or overeating. Then you can focus on healthy eating, as your tastebuds adjust you will realise that it can taste just as yummy!

Psychological effects of obesity

I wanted to touch on the psychological factors people deal with when they are overweight.

It can be hard being overweight or feeling overweight as this can make you feel unhappy with your body, feeling a social stigma associated with this.

Being overweight can have a very negative view from society and you can be viewed as lacking motivation or lacking self-control.

It’s important to realise that becoming overweight is not only associated with emotional factors but also cultural, economic influences, religious, age, gender and social surroundings. However, a person’s emotions play a significant role in becoming overweight.

Many overweight people are aware of this discrimination and they may suffer from low self-esteem, risk of more emotional eating, feeling uncomfortable with their body, emotional strain on relationships and taking drastic actions to overcome the situation.

Sometimes surgery can be considered to assist with drastic weight loss to help the person who cannot control emotional eating.

Some great results have been seen so far with these methods but there are also emotional struggles which are common post-surgery. Some frustrations can occur with a slowdown of weight loss after a period or they may have difficulty following their new post-operative diet. It’s important for these patients to also make changes to a healthier behaviour associated with food and dealing with emotional triggers.

As you will need to get a handle on your emotions either way you proceed, losing weight can be done naturally with making positive changes to your life and your behaviour.

It’s important when wanting to lose weight that you aim to achieve a realistic goal with loss in a realistic timeframe to improve your overall health. Aiming for a weight loss of 0.5kg per week is a healthy weight loss goal, managing your food intake and 30 minutes of exercise daily.

When you are ready to talk about it, join some groups or go to some workshops so you have someone who is going to a similar situation. This can help you not feel alone, have other people to talk to and it helps to get that emotion out so you can deal with it.

Consult your medical practitioner and a nutritional counsellor or dietitian to help you manage this correctly whichever route you have chosen to live a healthier life.