I’ve learned a lot about emotional eating over the years. It’s something that I’ve come to realize will always be a part of my life in some way. It’s something that will always keep me on my toes. For me, one of the hardest parts about emotional eating was the feeling of powerlessness that I always felt. I didn’t feel like I had control over my emotions or any control around food. Which is why I’m sharing some of my emotional eating tips to take back your power.
Just a reminder that these are tips that have work for me. At the end of the day, if you feel you need extra help to deal with emotional eating therapy is a fabulous tool that I highly recommend.
But if you want some emotional eating tips that you can start implementing right away then keep reading!
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Emotional Eating Tips To Take Back Your Power
Sit With Your Negative Emotions For 5 Minutes
For me, 9 times out of 10 if I’m feeling the urge to eat emotionally, it’s a result of experiencing negative emotions. Before, I would get this feeling of overwhelm that would be so uncomfortable I would feel the need to instantly numb it. This blinding impulse would drive me to eat everything I could get my hands on and I would consume it as fast as I could without a second thought, I just wanted to feel better. Eventually, it got to the point where even the slightest overwhelm had me heading to my cupboards.
But I eventually learned that what I needed to do was sit with those uncomfortable, negative emotions. I needed to experience those feelings instead of rushing to numb them. So I practiced learning to be uncomfortable and learning how to sit with my negative feelings and discovering new ways to help them pass.
What I discovered was that being uncomfortable is okay. And that if I sit with my feelings for 5 minutes, I’m able to approach everything, including my urge to eat emotionally from a more calm and rational place.
Since practicing sitting with negative emotions, I’ve been able to learn how to eat to soothe (for example, have a single cookie and walking away), instead of bingeing to numb.
Express The Emotion
One of the problems I used to have was with expressing my emotions and how I was really feeling. I would have these negative emotions and instead of communicating them with anyone, I would bury them deep down inside. And then when I was alone, the feelings would soar to the surface and I would attack the issue with food.
When I started to take control of my emotional eating, one of the biggest habits that helped me was simply learning to express how I was feeling. At first, I didn’t actually express my emotions to another person, but I began to at least express them out loud to myself. I would sit with my emotions and say to myself, “I am feeling…and that makes me want to eat”.
Doing this really helped me separate my emotions from feelings of hunger. Because if you’re an emotional eater you understand what I mean when I say our hunger cues start to get really confused by our unpredictable eating patterns.
Eventually, I began to share my emotions with safe people. I learned how to say, “I’m struggling right now and I want food but what I really need is…”. Expressing your emotions and saying things out loud, even if it’s hard, will give you so much of your power back.
Ground Yourself
If you’re like me, when the impulse to eat emotionally hits really hard, it can be like having blinders on. It is literally like tunnel vision, and the rest of the world fades away until relief, in the form of food, is provided. When this happens, the habit I’ve adopted is to ground myself as quickly as possible.
When the compulsion for a food binge comes on, it almost feels like everything in your body takes on a life of its own. Your legs, arms, hands, mouth are all moving on their own, and all parts of your brain that aren’t focused on food shut down. In those moments, I would feel disconnected from the world around me.
So I’ve learned to ground myself. Grounding means to reconnect with the Earth and the world around you. For me, grounding means anything that pulls me back into reality and has me focusing on the concrete world around me. And I do this in a few different ways. Here are some of my go-to ways to ground myself:
- meditation
- inspirational podcast
- breathwork
- music
Personally, music, inspirational podcasts, and guided meditations help me to remove the blinders and bring my brain back into awareness of the world around me.
Move Your Body
Over the past few years, I have learned to love moving my body. When I didn’t understand body movement, I viewed it as a chore or punishment. It was always something I did as a result of something else. It was either a result of not being happy with my body or because I ate something I felt at the time that I shouldn’t have.
When I made the choice to love myself and my body at the beginning of my health journey (instead of seeing self-love as some reward at the end), how I viewed body movement completely changed. Body movement all of a sudden became this positive thing that I did to make my body feel good. The surprise to me was that it was making my brain feel good as well.
Body movement helped me move through and explore my emotions in a different way. As a result, I simply didn’t feel the urge to eat emotionally as much. Body movement has become one of my preventative measures to protect myself from emotional eating.
A Cup Of Comfort
What I’ve learned over the years is that when I feel the need to eat emotionally, I’m often times simply looking for comfort. I would turn to food because it would make me feel good, at least temporarily. At the end of the day, I just wanted to feel comforted. And I had been conditioned from a young age that food would do that for me.
But I’ve since replaced some of my emotional eating with coffee and tea. Using mindfulness, I’ve taught myself to appreciate the comfort, warmth, and general feelings of goodness that comes from a good cup of coffee. And to allow these feelings to soothe my feelings of discomfort. I use my favorite mug, I sometimes have a flavored coffee, I create a little coffee ritual, and by the time I’ve had my first sip, I’m often well on my way to a different headspace. And being in a different headspace is sometimes all you need to stop a food binge.
Safe Food
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, an emotional eating episode just happens. What I’ve found is that the best thing to do is simply be prepared. And that is where a safe food comes into play. A safe food is a food that you have specifically for times of emotional eating, it will fill the emotional eating “need” and, hopefully, prevent you from out-of-control eating.
For me, this means having small amounts of candy on-hand most of the time. I find it much safer to have a tiny bag of candy on hand than it is to head into a store or order takeout when I’m in the emotional eating headspace. I’ve taught myself how to only have a few candies at a time but honestly, at the beginning yes, I would eat the entire small bag. But because the food item was preplanned, it had a set amount of calories, and it was there with the permission to be eaten without guilt, it allowed me to eat emotionally without feeling bad about myself. And because I could now eat something emotionally and not feel bad about myself, it rarely spiraled and turned into a binge.
Give Yourself Grace
This is one of my favorite emotional eating tips. One of the biggest ways to take back your power when it comes to emotional eating is to give yourself grace. Recognize that you are a human who makes human decisions. You have human emotions and you make human mistakes. You are not expected to be perfect in any capacity.
So be gentle with yourself when it comes to handling your emotional eating. I’ve been working on my emotional eating for 4 years and I still struggle. The difference is now, I’ve learned how to truly address my reasons for emotional eating so it happens much less frequently.
Remember, at the end of the day, it is okay to feel soothed by food. It’s okay to feel comfort when we eat something that brings us joy. The issue lies in using food. Using food in place of conversation, in place of dealing with hard emotions, in place of dealing with our problems.
I hope you find these emotional eating tips to be helpful in your health journey.
Read these posts for more emotional eating tips and tips on changing your mindset!
- 4 Ways To Halt Emotional Eating
- How To Create a Positive Food Mindset
- 5 Mindset Changes That Will Transform Your Life
- 5 Ways To Change Your Relationship With Food
Have a question about emotional eating or other things I do to deal with negative feelings? Ask me in the comments!
Need help with emotional eating and making other big, positive lifestyle changes? Let’s connect and talk about my 1:1 Body Love Mindset Connection coaching services.
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