Is Stress Keeping You Fat? 5 Tips to End Your Emotional Eating

Emotional eating is when you consume food to deal with tough emotions rather than to satisfy actual physical hunger. Emotional eating is where the phrase “comfort foods” comes from. Comfort food is usually junk food or fast food. It’s food that you probably wouldn’t consume on a daily basis because of it’s high fat or sugar content. Often we eat comfort foods to soothe tough or negative emotions.

Have you ever came home from a long stressful day at work and skipped your planned workout? Instead, you just head straight for the fridge and before you knew it were eating your favorite comfort food? Maybe it was ice-cream, pizza, cookies or potato chips. Afterwards, you probably felt lazy, and relaxed the whole night, probably watching tv or surfing the net. You probably woke up the next day feeling guilty about sabotaging your weight loss efforts the previous night. You maybe even promised yourself that from now on you will never do this again. However, deep down you know that when you engage in emotional eating you lose control. If you were honest with yourself you might even admit that sometimes you are powerless over your junk food cravings.

Here are 5 Tips to End your Emotional Eating:

1. Become Aware of Your Emotional State. You need to start becoming more aware of your emotions throughout the day. It’s not a good idea to let stress, worry, disappointment or any other negative emotion build up. Otherwise that emotion will take over you and you will engage in emotional eating. A technique you can use is asking “how do I feel?” at different random times during the day. This will help you catch yourself when you are starting to feel stressed out. Becoming aware will help you pause before you reach for food to deal with tough emotions.