It’s been a long and stressful day at the office, your kids are acting up and you have to cook dinner, when all you want is to get away. You are stressed, anxious, tired and obviously irritated.
How do you deal with these inflamed emotions?
Can a bag of salty, crunchy chips do the trick? Are a few scoops of ice cream enough to improve your mood?
Well apparently, and unfortunately for a lot of people, they are.
The use of food as a solution to solve feelings of frustration, pain, sadness, anger, boredom and anxiety is all too common. Unfortunately, emotional eating can also be a serious obstacle to your weight loss goals, and this is just one of the side effects of this type of eating disorder.
The good and the bad
Many people turn to food when they are feeling down, irritated, and stressed. For a very short period of time, eating can make you feel relaxed as food brings you comfort. As a result, they start to depend on food too often when faced with problems and negative emotions.
The cliché “chick flick” inevitably always features a girl reaching for a gallon of ice cream after a breakup, and this scene gets played way too hard in Hollywood.
While emotional eating can give you a quick escape from reality, it’s not a healthy practice, by any means, especially when you’re eating high-calorie and junk foods, which is often the food of choice for emotional eaters.
Have you ever seen that girl in the movie reaching for spinach?
Emotional eating, also known as comfort eating, is an unhealthy habit that can cause a variety of problems for you and those you love.
Not only will it lead to unwanted weight gain and overeating, but emotional eating can also cause a number of medical conditions, including anxiety, high cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and much more. Furthermore, it can lead to adverse mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and body dysmorphic disorder.
weight gain
Emotional eating, simply put, is the practice of eating large amounts of sweet and fatty foods in reaction to feelings and emotions rather than physical hunger.
Clearly, this bad habit sabotages your weight loss efforts, since you’ll be consuming a lot of calories that your body doesn’t need and never burn off. In turn, these excess calories will be converted to fat, which will lead to weight gain.
If you are an emotional eater, it will be much more difficult to lose weight because the habit of reaching for unhealthy foods is so ingrained that it will sabotage weight loss efforts.
a vicious and unpleasant cycle
The worst part of this unhealthy habit is that it can cause problems to multiply, which can add to your weight even more. Eventually, emotional eating can prevent you from learning skills and techniques that can effectively resolve your emotional distress. Instead, you will rely on using more and more food to suppress your emotions.
Regardless of the feelings that lead you to overeat, the end result will always be the same. Not only will your emotions return to their original state, but you will add guilt and shame as a result of overeating, which can prompt you to eat even more. The result more weight gain.
A vicious and unpleasant cycle.
impulse eating
While most people eat less during times of distress, emotional eating can turn into binge or impulsive eating. In this disorder, you will be quickly eating whatever is convenient, without the pleasure of consuming it.
In fact, emotional overeating can become so habitual that you can immediately grab a culinary treat whenever you’re stressed and angry, without even thinking about what you’re doing. Of course, this will lead to further weight gain and sabotage any weight loss effort you’re making.
How to get back to normal
Although stressful times and hard-to-manage emotions can trigger this bad eating habit, it’s still possible for you to control your cravings and maintain your ideal weight.
Here are some tips on how to prevent emotional eating.
• Awareness is half the battle: Understanding your emotional eating habits and their triggers goes a long way in starting the recovery process.
• stress busters: If stress makes you eat more, practice healthy stress management techniques, such as meditation or yoga.
• Get professional help: A mental health counselor can provide therapy that will help you get back on track and teach you healthy coping skills and eliminate the need to search for food.
• fight boredom: Watch a movie, talk, walk in the park, listen to music, call a friend, and do whatever else distracts you from eating. Boredom is one of the main pitfalls of emotional overeating, and with a little attention and mindfulness, this can be reversed.