It’s been a long and stressful day at the office, your kids are misbehaving and you have to cook dinner, when all you really want is to get away. You are stressed, anxious, tired, and obviously irritated.
How do you deal with these burning emotions?
Can a bag of salty and crunchy potato 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.
Using food as a solution to fix 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 feel depressed, irritated, and stressed. For a very short period of time, eating can make them feel relaxed, as food provides comfort. As a result, they start to depend on food too often when faced with negative emotions and problems.
The cliché “chick flick” inevitably always features a girl looking for a gallon of ice cream after a breakup, and this scene gets played out too much in Hollywood.
While emotional eating can give you a quick getaway from reality, it is by no means a healthy practice, especially when you’re eating high-calorie, junk food, which is generally the food of choice for emotional eaters.
Have you ever seen that girl in the movie looking for spinach?
Emotional eating, also known as comfort eating, is an unhealthy habit that can cause a variety of problems for you and your loved ones.
Not only will it lead to unwanted weight gain and overeating, but emotional eating can also cause a handful of medical conditions, including anxiety, high cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and many more. In addition, 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, as you will consume a large number of calories that your body does not need and that you will never burn. In turn, this excess calories will turn into fat, leading to weight gain.
If you are an emotional eater, it will be much more difficult to lose weight because the habit of looking for unhealthy foods is so ingrained that it will sabotage your weight loss efforts.
A vicious and unpleasant cycle
The worst part about this unhealthy habit is that it can cause problems and multiply problems, which can further increase your weight. Over time, emotional eating can prevent you from learning skills and techniques that can effectively resolve your emotional distress. Instead, it will depend on the increasing use of food to suppress 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 on top of them, which can prompt you to eat even more. The result is greater weight gain.
A vicious and unpleasant cycle.
Impulsive feeding
While most people eat less during stressful times, emotional eating can turn into bingeing or impulsive eating. In this disorder, you will quickly eat whatever is convenient, without the joy of consuming it.
In fact, emotional overeating can become so habitual that you can immediately have a culinary delight whenever you are stressed and angry, without even thinking about what you are doing. Of course, this will lead to further weight gain and sabotage of any weight loss efforts you are undertaking.
How to get back on track
Even though difficult, stressful times and emotions can trigger this bad eating habit, it is still possible for you to control your cravings and maintain your ideal weight.
Here are some tips on how to prevent emotional eating.
• Consciousness is half the battle: Understanding your emotional eating habits and triggers is very important to begin the recovery process.
• Eliminate stress: 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 the right track and teach you healthy skills to cope with life’s problems 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 anything else that distracts you from eating. Boredom is one of the main pitfalls of emotional overfeeding, and with a little attention and attention, this can be reversed.