Coping with Emotional Overeating

One may not be aware of the term but may be living it. Emotional overeating or compulsive overeating is an obsessive behavior towards eating. There are a lot of such people suffering from emotional overeating. This is characterized by binge eating, eating more rapidly than normally, eating alone as a result of embarrassment, experiencing the feeling of guilt due to overeating, preoccupation with one’s own body weight even though there is no reason whatsoever for this, depression, awareness that one’s own eating pattern are not on normal basis, the rapid weight gain that one may suffer, the decrease in one’s mobility, due to the weight gains, a prone history of long unsuccessful diets, eating little in public but still having a good weight, experiencing a very low self esteem.

By what is this characterized? By consuming more than 5,000 calories per day. Is it normal? Not a single normal person can consume and eat so much; it just makes you sick if you eat that much. But probably the over eaters are used to this style and that is why they can eat just as much and feel they are not saturated. That is why; some of them may get all the way up to consuming over 15,000 calories per day. This becomes a real drug, 15,000 calories per day means consuming 600 calories per hour – which signifies that one must eat in a continuous manner.

The most important thing is to face the fact that you are dealing with a very serious problem and you have to do something about it or else…this is no good for your health, your looks, or for your psychic or your social relations.

Emotional eating

is not such a simple process so one may have tried a lot of possibilities and never succeeded that is why it is important to have some support that will help you not give up and continue with your trials until you eventually succeed. This is a situation that is created mainly due to feeling something there at the physic location, such as frustration, stress, boredom, angry, sad, unsatisfied with oneself, full of work, etc. emotions are a normal thing that a person feels, they are rather positive or negative, they are what differentiates us from the animals. While most of us have positive emotions about one’s life, there are many that fight to get rid of the negative ones.  This is when overeating appears.

This is a situation that starts being treated from the moment we have control over our food, not the food has control over us. There is the character that each of us has that offers us the possibility to fight overeating.

Some of the main tips to control emotional overeating is to write down your cravings – by writing down what one feels the need to eat at a certain moment one will spot the causing problem food, this will allow you to avoid having it around, to realize what exactly one does at that moment when one craves for that thing and stop doing that thing and this way one of your problem is gone. This does not necessarily mean a sheet of paper, but may be a full diary in which one will be able of writing down more feelings as exactly what you feel when you think of that specific food. It is advisable to keep the diary for as long as one can. Related to this, until you succeed in fighting this craving of yours, one can easily try and limit the intake. That is to say more bluntly, to take just two bites out of the food you need.

You must face the fact that food will not solve any of your problems that you may be dealing with. If you believe that you are facing too many problems and you turn to food, one must realize the fact that food will not solve any of your problems.  It will just not make the world a better living place. You must write down the facts that eating too much does to your life. You will then  see that it prevents you of getting out and about, it is limiting the activities you may be doing with your loved ones, triggers the appearance of other health issues and above all this it affects your personal relations with the opposite sex. By putting all of these down on a paper, you will seize that you are actually not leading a normal life an emotional eating is overeating your life.

One must try and not eat alone anymore. This way one will be able of sharing and of feeling too embarrassed of eating too much. Just as important, the eating environment and how one eats, affects ones emotional eating. One must learn to eat while sitting down calmly, avoid any distractions while eating, like TV, newspaper, books, conversations that cause anxiety. One must never finish eating when feeling stuffed. It is important that your stomach feels satisfied, but not too full.

Some of us may feel guilty of wasting food and cannot stand the fact that food is not eaten all from the plate. This is just a fixation that one should control. This way of thinking will not do your body and health any good, out of the contrary. It is all in your mind. You must be strong enough and take control over your mind. It is important to find other ways to cope with your emotions rather than the food. There are a lot of possibilities to choose from, possibilities that may come to have good results and actually may lead you to learn something out from them. Such things are spending more time with friends, join a dance class or a tennis class or whichever sport may make you pleasure, pamper yourself with a good cinema movie from time to time, instead of eating, find out what literature you like, and find proper books to read.

In coping with the emotional eating it is important to know that results cannot be attained in one day, nothing was made in one day, therefore, one must pick goals and attain them step by step. Bigger goals will just add more disappointment.