Do you eat when you are feeling down? Is food a comfort to you? You may be eating your emotions. Emotional eating is when you use food to make yourself feel better. There are four signs that you can look for to determine if you are an emotional eater.
Signs That You Are An Emotional Eater
1. You have a habit of eating when you are not physically hungry. Try to figure out the last time you ate. Was it three hours ago or a half an hour ago? Did you eat because your body was sending signals that you were hungry? Was your stomach grumbling? Was your energy at a low level?
2. Another sign that you are an emotional eater is the fact that you are a picky eater. It is hard for you to find a food that satisfies you. Although you are not happy with the food, you still do not stop eating when you are full. When find yourself eating things you do not like for the sake of eating something, you might be an emotional eater.
3. Another tell-tale sign that you are eating for your comfort is that your cravings are triggered by your negative emotions. For example, every time you feel anger, anxiety or boredom, you have a craving for certain foods.
4. You eat your food in a trance. People who emotionally eat sometimes eat mindlessly. That means your actions are mechanic. You do not necessarily taste the food you are eating. It is like watching TV when a big game is on the screen. You are eating the chips like a reflex, but you are not really paying attention to the chips.
Why does food comfort you?
There are many reasons people seek comfort from food when they are undergoing moments of stress.
Biology
When you are stressed, your body has a high level of cortisol, the stress hormone. Cortisol makes you crave fatty foods, sugar and carbohydrates. When you eat those types of foods, it soothes the chemical changes in your body. For example, chocolate helps release the feel good neurotransmitters from your brain to your body. As a result, you are more alert and excited.
An Occupied Mind
Food can comfort you by distracting you. You are not busy thinking about your stressor if all your attention is on what you are eating.
Beliefs
Most people grow up believing that food can help ease the pain. This belief can come from many things. Maybe you were rewarded with food when you were depressed as a child or it could be the array of media ads that display food as a having therapeutic value. A lot of ads associate nouns such as happiness, delight and bliss with food.
Convenience
In this modern time, we all prefer things that are easy and convenient. When you are stressed, there is always a vending machine or fast food restaurant nearby.
Entertainment
Food can entertain us. We live in a happening society. Many of us cannot stand boredom or anxiety. We either eat food to past the time or prepare food and eat it to entertain us.
Good Vibes
As I hinted at earlier, emotional eating can be associated with our childhood. We seek to get back those feelings we had when we ate fresh home baked cookies or macaroni. We want to recapture those positive feelings and comforting memories.
How to Stop Emotional Eating
The best way to stop using food to comfort you is to think about the future. When people think about the future and how their indulgence now can affect it, they are more likely to make healthier eating choices when they are tempted to emotionally eat.
This works because when you think of the long-term implications, you are more likely to consider any future health risk. When you just think about how the food affects you now, it can be easy to focus on the taste of the food or how the food is affecting you emotionally. You are not worried about increasing your chances of developing a preventable disease like type 2 diabetes.
Another way to stop emotional eating is to figure out your triggers. Once you figure out your triggers, you can change your behavior. In other words, go for a walk when you feel angry instead of picking up a dozen doughnuts to eat.
Emotional eating is not good for your body or your mind. If you are an emotional eater, it is never too late to get out of this habit. Think about your future and find other more positive ways to let go of negative emotions.
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