10 Tips To Avoid Emotional Eating

Is emotional eating sabotaging your weight loss goals?

By Rob Kominiarek — Written on Apr 06, 2012

10 Tips To Avoid Emotional Eating [EXPERT]

Food has such a powerful place in all of our lives. It's how we bond with our families as we grow. It has stron cultural and ethnic roots in every society. It's there when we celebrate and it's there when we mourn. When you stop to think about it, eating is the one thing we do every single day where we use all of our senses.

We see the bright red color of a delicious apple; we smell the aroma of cinnamon and crust from a freshly baked hot apple pie. We taste that sweet sugary goodness of the pie and feel the texture of it in our mouths and we are aware of our surroundings filled with family and friends and we hear the sounds of laughter. When you are using all of your senses, you are truly alive. Do you wonder why food has such strong, powerful, emotional connection to all of our lives? Help! My Partner Is Sabotaging My Health Goals

However, emotional eating can sabotage your weight-loss efforts permanently if you are not careful. Emotional eating often leads to indulging in too many high-calorie, sweet and sugary foods. The good news is that if you are prone to emotional eating, you can take steps to gain control of your unhealthy habits and take control of your life and your weight.

Emotional eating is a way to deal with negative emotions. Emotions such as anger, boredom, fear, sadness, jealousy, stress and loneliness can all trigger a feeding frenzy. Just the hassles of daily life can produce negative emotions that lead to emotional eating that can destroy all of your efforts.

These are some very common reasons for emotional eating:

Loss of a job
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Financial pressure
Illness
The "D" word
Work stress
Boredom
Fatigue
Getting married
Strained relations with family and friends

Some people, however, actually eat less when challenged by strong feelings. People in emotional distress may turn to binge eating, rapidly eating whatever is available without ever even taking the time to enjoying it. Your emotions may become so hard-wired to your eating habits that you automatically reach for junk food whenever you feel stressed without stopping to think about what you are even doing.

Food is a wonderful distraction from the stresses of everyday life, and it is easy to find comfort and pleasure in all that sugary goodness when you perceive that things in your life are not going well. If you're worried about an upcoming event such as a wedding or stewing over a relationship conflict, you may focus on eating comfort food instead of dealing with the painful situation—which requires healthy coping skills, emotional strength and delayed gratification. 5 Ways To Avoid Spring Holiday Weight Gain

Whatever underlying emotion drives you to overeat, the end result is always the same. The emotions return and now you bear the additional burden of guilt about failing to keep your weight loss commitment. This can lead to an unhealthy cycle. Your emotions trigger you to overeat, you beat yourself up for overeating and falling off your dietary plan, you feel badly...and what do you do? You overeat again.

I am here to tell you there is hope and it all starts with awareness of your behavior. Negative emotions can trigger emotional eating and you can take steps to control the feeding frenzy and keep your weight loss efforts moving forward. Head Over Meals: How Love Makes You Fat

Here are some useful suggestions to help control emotional eating: