7 Tips on How to Deal with Emotional Eating — Om Naturelle Nutrition

If you’re an emotional eater and an intermittent faster, bad days can be incredibly hard to stick with IF and healthy foods. During times of stress our bodies tend to crave carbs. We’ve all seen it (or experienced it) a bad breakup usually ends with us ladies digging into a tub of ice cream while chugging a bottle of wine. A rough work day usually greets us with an overload of sweets in the evening. A fight with a friend can find us sobbing over a bag of chips or an entire box of cookies, trying to eat the emotions away.

So how can we stop this knee-jerk reaction to eat when we are feeling overly emotional? Here I will discuss with you, 7 tips on how to deal with emotional eating. These tips are not just directed at intermittent fasters. I highly recommend anyone who is prone to emotional eating to read these tips and follow through with action to help prevent this type of unhealthy binge eating. Alright, here we go:

Tip #1: Keep a Food Diary

Keeping a food diary is a very mindful way of learning how and when you eat. Food journals can be used for a multitude of different things, but when it comes to emotional eating, they are great for understanding triggers. A food diary is an act of self-love really. Tracking things such as what you’re eating, when you’re eating, how much you’re eating, where you’re eating, what your mood is when you’re eating, what the weather is when you’re eating. This can lead you to a greater understanding of what fuels your desire.

Keeping a food diary can help you to lose weight and it can help you to understand your food choices. Yes, it can be tedious and time consuming — but you have to ask yourself, aren’t you worth it? Make it a part of your self-care protocol, and take the time regardless — because we always make time for those we love. And you should always love yourself most.

Tip #2: Know Your Triggers

Next, we need to understand what triggers us to eat. This works in conjunction with tip #1. After a few months of food journaling (I recommend 30–90 days of food journaling before making changes), you’ll begin to flip back through the pages and you’ll see a pattern emerge. Take the time to read through the journal entries where you struggling with emotional eating, and you’ll learn what triggers this behavior in you. This is a major player in you being the solution to your own problems. The mindful act of being aware of your emotions, your patterns, and your triggers, is not only brave, but it is the single-most important aspect of your own self growth as well.

Tip #3: Ask Yourself WHY (are you eating)

Whenever we put something in our mouths, before we eat it, we should ask ourselves “WHY?” Are we truly hungry? Is it that you’re tired? Maybe it’s boredom? Are we sad? We use food as a comfort for many different aspects of our lives. Hence the term “comfort food”. Food has one true purpose: To sustain us and keep us alive. While nature makes some incredibly delicious foods, it is man who has led you to believe that food is the answer to many of life’s problems. Man has altered food to the point where it is actually killing us now.

So, let’s take back control of our emotions and the foods we eat. This starts by asking why. If you’re eating because you’re truly hungry, GREAT! If not, you need to address that. A lot of us eat because we’re bored. So, find something to do. A lot of us eat when we are thirsty. So, get a drink. A lot of us eat when we are tired. So, get up and move your body instead. If you are sad, angry, or hurt, acknowledge those feelings but refrain from eating.

Tip #4: Drink Water Instead

If you’re not sure why you’re eating. Or if you are tired, bored, or in an emotional state; drink water in place of eating food. If you’re not sure if you’re actually hungry or not. Drink water. Drinking between 8 and 16 ounces of water in place of food, and waiting 20 minutes or so will often clue you in as to whether or not your hunger is in fact true hunger. People tend to under estimate the power of drinking water in place of eating when the feeling calls out to you.

Tip #5: Choose Healthy Foods

If you’ve drank loads of water, waited, and are still dealing with feelings of hunger, or you’ve had a bad day or a fight with someone you care about; eat, but make healthier food choices instead. A lot of the time, especially when we eat emotionally, we crave sweets. If you’ve been tracking your intake, you’ve established what your patterns and triggers are, then it becomes so much easier to prepare for the next emotional overload. The simplest act is to remove all junk food from the house.

Because we often crave sweets in times of distress, it’s best to replace the cookies with fruits. If you don’t have allergies and chocolate is your thing, find a raw nut mix that has dark chocolate bits in it. You can even prepare yourself a “snag bag” which is nothing more than a pre-planned snack (or snacks) for your next emotional overload. This can include a few fruits, a cup of yogurt, a ½ cup of raw nuts with dark chocolate, and maybe even your favorite protein bar. That snag bag is a much healthier alternative to eating cookies, chips, baked goods, and ice cream.

Tip #6: Write It Out

Another way to divert yourself from emotional eating is to write out what is bothering you. Keep a journal or a diary. Sometimes what really helps is to write the meanest, nastiest, most cruel letter to the person who hurt you. Write them a letter explaining what they did, how it hurt, and how you feel, maybe even write how you’d like to hurt them in return. Be mean. Be REALLY MEAN. Just lay it on thick and put it all out there. And then when you are done writing and you feel satisfied, you feel better. Burn the letter.

This is something I actually do often. I cannot stress enough how much it helps to just write it out, get the emotional baggage off your chest and on to paper instead. Writing letters with no intention of them ever being read, and then destroying them is extremely powerful. Because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what other people do, think or say about you. What matters is how you react to them, and the damage you cause yourself by holding onto that emotion, both physically and mentally.

Tip #7: When You JUST DON’T CARE!

There will be times when the hurt is so big that you really just don’t give a rat’s ass about what you put into your body. For example: losing a loved one, or the ending of a marriage. I’m talking major life events that have your emotions in such an extreme state that you feel like you’re on the cusp of insanity. Or maybe you’re so low and depressed that you just can’t bring yourself to care. These moments happen and that is perfectly ok. In these moments we can take a second or two to acknowledge that the emotion is much bigger than you in that moment and you can absolutely binge.

However, in that second take time to mindfully put a timeline on it and stick to it. We all know that extreme emotion won’t last, neither should the binge eating. And don’t beat yourself up over it. We are all human, and we are all trying. When we get knocked down, we can stay down for a little while, but we can NEVER live there. Eventually you have to get back up, dust yourself off, hold your head high, and push forward again.

CONCLUSION

Emotional eating can be corrected with mindfulness and proper preparation. Being self-aware of your thoughts, actions, triggers, and patterns. Accepting your reality and being responsive instead of reactive. This is how you help yourself become someone who is not an emotional eater. Love yourself enough to treat yourself with care and compassion when things get tough, but also love yourself enough to not compromise your health in the long term. Health is wealth. And believe it or not, you DO have full control of what you put into your body and when.

Until next time,
Cheers!

Originally published at https://omnaturelle.com on February 11, 2022.