The Emotional Eating Alternative

The Emotional Eating Alternative

An emotional eating habit is the most common “bad” eating habit I see as an Eating Habit Coach. (Mindless eating can fall under this category too.)

Why it’s labeled as “bad” is because there is a net negative effect on your health. Your emotional and physical health.

It affects you negatively emotionally in a number of ways. The biggest being that instead of feeling your emotions, you eat to lessen them.

This is just temporary and actually decreases your ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotions. So over time, your emotions feel worse to you.

You’ll also have a tougher time managing them when they do occur. And, you’ll even find you need more and more food to try to lessen the discomfort of them.

So I’ll be sharing an emotional eating alternative, which is the best way to truly break an emotional eating habit. It not only breaks the habit, but also helps you to manage your emotions way better during the course of your life.

Because let’s face it, emotions will come up. In fact, we want them to occur otherwise we’d be living a life void of feeling.

Why You Emotionally Eat

The main reason why you emotionally eat is to avoid the discomfort of the emotion. The emotion is usually one that doesn’t feel good (a negative emotion), such as worry, stress, boredom.

If you’re not used to feeling positive emotions, then those can feel uncomfortable and lead to emotional eating as well. This is less common.

If you just eat in response to an emotion on rare occasion, this would not be an emotional eating habit, so you may not notice many net negative effects yet. However, it can easily turn into a habit, so you might as well start nipping it in the bud now.

So what happens is because a negative (or positive) emotion feels uncomfortable, your brain wants that discomfort to go away.

Food is an easy way out of that discomfort, because it provides some temporary pleasure. Especially the sweet, salty, crunchy, savory foods. (Not so much the cooked green beans.)

You experience the uncomfortable emotion, eat the chocolate, feel better. Your brain takes note of that. Then, when that emotion (or another uncomfortable one) comes up again, your brain recalls that the chocolate made you feel better, even if it was just for a few seconds.

So, your brain will suggest to you that you eat some chocolate again, or if that’s not available, something similar. It then takes note again that the food made the emotion feel more tolerable.

This sequence of events repeats itself next time, and the next, and the next. Each time just reinforcing to your brain that it’s doing a good thing by eating in response to the emotion (even if the rational part of your brain feels bad about it afterward and KNOWS it’s not good for you to do.)

See how the habit starts to form?

• LISTEN OR READ: Emotional Eating: Is It Even a Problem? (Podcast Episode)
• LISTEN OR READ: Boredom Eating (Podcast Episode)

What to do Instead of Emotionally Eating

So, to start to break this emotional eating habit (or if it’s not a habit yet, to prevent it from becoming one), we need to show your brain that it’s perfectly safe to just feel the emotion for a bit.

Doing this for a little bit each time you feel the uncomfortable emotion (or any emotion) shows it that the emotion itself is not dangerous. It doesn’t need to go away ASAP.

In fact, it’s a good thing to feel the negative emotion, because that makes the positive emotions more positive. If we aren’t allowing ourself to feel the emotions, we’ll just get numb to all emotions.

Therefore the emotional eating alternative is to PROCESS the emotion. In the most simple terms, feel the feelings and then they’ll pass right on through.

The only reason why feelings hang around for longer than we want is because we aren’t processing them. We’re resisting them. We’re thinking how terrible they are. We’re focused on how bad the feeling feels.

Processing the emotion just means allowing your body to feel the sensations that the emotion produces in your body. When you focus on just feeling them, they’ll pass on through.

• GET WEEKLY TIPS: Eating Habit and Weight Loss Tips
• LISTEN OR READ: Stress and Eating Habits (Podcast Episode)

How Processing Emotions Break an Emotional Eating Habit

When you process your emotions (at least the ones that usually lead you to emotionally eat), you’re re-training your brain. You’re breaking that link between the discomfort of the emotion and eating in response to that discomfort.

You’re showing your brain that it doesn’t need the food to take away the discomfort. You’re “unlearning” that sequence of events.

You start out just identifying the emotion (ex. stress), then just taking a pause to focus on how it feels in your body. When you take that pause, you’re helping to break some of that automaticity of the emotional eating habit. That’s the intent.

When you focus on how the emotion feels in your body, you’re getting out of your head. Out of your thoughts and into your body. You’re understanding that the emotion is just some sensations in your body and that’s it. There’s nothing dangerous here.

Every time you do this, you’re giving proof to your brain. Proof that the emotion is not something that needs to go away with food. Also, proof that you can handle the emotion without food.

You keep doing this each time (even if you still go for the chocolate the first 10 times…you just make sure you’re increasing the amount of time that you’re just feeling the feeling), until the emotional eating habit is broken.

A beautiful thing that you’ll discover is that you’re much better able to handle ANY emotion. Emotions will no longer feel that painful to you. You’ll start feeling stress, anxiety, boredom, etc. come on and think, “I feel you, anxiety. You’re not a problem. I can totally handle you.”

This is actually what helped me completely treat my generalized anxiety disorder. I was told I’d always have it and have to take medicine for it, but they were wrong.

This one skill helped me massively with my anxiety in general and with my emotional eating habit, so I KNOW it will help you too.

• LISTEN OR READ: How to Break an Emotional Eating Habit (Blog Post)
• LISTEN OR READ: Are You Using Food as an Escape? (Podcast Episode)

Final Notes (& More Help)

Just knowing that there is an emotional eating alternative is comforting. Knowing that it not only enables you to break your emotional eating habit, but also helps you be able to manage your emotions a lot better for the rest of your life, is exciting.

Imagine your life 6 months, a year, 5 years from now, experiencing your positive emotions to their fullest, feeling your negative emotions in a way that doesn’t feel terrible, and feeling totally in control with the food you put into your mouth?

Imagine eating in response to hunger, not an emotion. Imagine enjoying a piece of cake for what it is, not because it’s temporarily decreasing sadness or worry or work stress.

Imagine your life without the pain or shame of the emotional eating habit hanging over you. You can have that life, my lovely career woman.