Stop Binge Eating - Stop Overeating

It’s very easy to engage in Emotional Eating.  Facing tough issues in your life, and stressful situations is hard. Emotional Eating is the easy way out.

Emotional eating is consuming food for comfort.  Let me share with you my personal experience with it.  For a long time I disliked my job.   After work, I would come home and instead of preparing my resume and looking for another job I would just engage in emotional eating.  I would resort to food for comfort.

The question is How to Stop Emotional Eating? Before I can help you out with that, you need to first understand why we engage in emotional eating in the first place.

The why is easy.  Food is comforting, especially junk food.  It numbed out my emotions, and helped me ignore the stress and dissatisfaction I felt towards my job.

If you are overeating or binge eating often it has to do with emotions.  Are you eating out of boredom?  Or eating to deal with stress?  Do you feel like overeating when you are having a tough day?

The first step to stop emotional eating is to identify your triggers.  These are the events or circumstances in your life that generally lead you to overeating or binge-eating.

Once you identify your emotional eating triggers, you will increase your awareness.  You will be able to predict an emotional eating episode before it even happens.  You will start becoming more aware of the sequence of thoughts and emotions that you have that lead to overeating.

The more aware you become, the easier it will be to stop emotional eating before you even start engaging in it.

You shouldn’t feel guilty and ashamed of your emotional eating.  Rather understand that it’s normal, eveyrone has done it at some point in their life whether or not they realize it, and you can recover.  The key to recovery from emotional eating is learning the roots of it in your personal life.

For me, stress from my job was an emotional eating trigger.  What are your triggers?  What drains your energy, stresses you out, and often leads you to engage in emotional eating?

Once you identify your triggers you need to brain-storm action steps.  These will be action-steps to eliminate or avoid those triggers as much as possible.  For me it meant finding a new job.  That was tough however in the long run it’s much easier and more rewarding than engaging in emotional eating.

What action steps do you need to take?  Try to come up with at least one action step you can take right now or today to get your emotional eating under control.  The first action-step is usually the toughest.

Say you disliked your job like I did, one action step you can take today would be to update your resume.

Additionally if you would like some accountability in getting your emotional eating under control, I would advice you to share your struggles and seek support in the forum.

What triggers your Emotional Eating?

Growing up I had very weak personal boundaries. I had a very hard time saying no to others requests or demands. This initially started with my parents where in many ways I was basically trying to live my life in a way that would please them. And I think every child does this to some degree however I think I did it too much. And most of the blame for this falls on to me, I can’t blame my parents for wanting to raise what they would think of as an “ideal” son. They are just regular loving parents. So what did I do?

As soon as I could afford living on my own, I moved out. Did this solve the problem? yes and no. I no longer had to worry about pleasing my parents yet I still had weak personal boundaries with others in my life. I still had a hard time saying no to anyone. For example, the other day I get a knock on my door. I answer the door to find out it’s my neighbor, who wants to hang out and is asking if she can come in. This wasn’t a good time for me, since I was in the middle of working on a really important project. However I said “sure”, and in many ways that was my natural unexamined reaction. I did hang out with my neighbor for a couple of hours.

After my neighbor left, i started feeling a really strong temptation to snack, even though I wasn’t physically hungry. When I paused and examined previous events/emotions/thoughts I had I realized that I should of said “No” to my neighbor. And that I was disappointed about the fact that she wasted my time, and that I’m too weak to say no. And now I was basically trying to resort to food for comfort. This is when I started thinking back to other times I’ve done this in my life, and realized that this was a pattern for me growing up, etc.

Next time I’m in a similar situation, I will be more aware of what’s going on in real time, and will probably be able to say “No” and set clear personal boundaries.

To find your emotional eating triggers, think back to the last time you overate. Think of the events/emotions/thoughts you went through before overeating. If you can’t remember, then be aware of the next time you are tempted to overeat, and examine previous events/emotions/thoughts you had earlier. Leave a comment below with any findings