How many times do you struggle with overwhelming feelings that push you to eat?
You could be having a perfectly great day and all of a sudden something happens to throw you off kilter and you find yourself desperately craving food.
A phone call, a suspicion roused, an upcoming confrontation, a bill arrives in the mail, a painful memory, a difficult client, a disappointment, a computer glitch, a bad weigh in, a fat day, a fight with your husband, a face off with your son, grieving a loss, an argument, fearing for your job, a rejection, a hurtful comment, a nasty look, a bounced check, coping with difficult people, living with and enduring emotional or physical pain–
To your stressed out emotions and exhausted body, these are all very good and valid reasons to eat.
We’re constantly juggling and doing an internal balancing act with our emotions. You have feelings about everything. That’s the nature of being human.
Anytime you feel overwhelmed that’s the straw that can break the camel’s back when it comes to you staying in control of your eating. Why?
Your emotions are like chemical storms in your brain.
Scientific research has proven that there is a complex system of communication that goes on consistently between your mind and body. This goes on behind the scenes without you having any conscious awareness of it.
Scientists have isolated neurotransmitters (chemical messengers of thought) and discovered that they are in every cell of our bodies. That means that your body and mind are always standing at attention, waiting patiently for you to issue commands. The things you tell yourself will determine how you feel and what you do.
The moment you think or say to yourself, “I give up. I can’t do it,” you will falter and feel weak. If food has always been your go to method to make you feel better, then you’ll seek it out until you no longer need it.
As dieters or weight watchers, we tend to think of ourselves as fat and we learn all the habits and ways of thinking that reinforce our belief that we have no control over food. This is called the diet mentality.
How many times do you struggle with overwhelming feelings that push you to eat?
When I work with my clients in my Lovin’ the Skin You’re In Program, I teach them how to feel safe around eating all the foods they love by getting in touch with their body’s natural hunger, and eating in response to those cues.
One of the first assignments that I give them is to learn to distinguish between when they’re physically hungry and when their emotions are pushing them to want to eat.
I guide my clients to pay close attention to how often during the day they are aware of wanting to eat when they’re not physically hungry. They are amazed at how often they are besieged by obsessive thoughts of wanting to snack on something when they know intuitively that they are just not physically hungry.
Make Peace with Your Hunger
Unlike what dieting has probably taught you, your hunger is nothing to fear. It is completely natural. It’s a physiological response indicating that your body’s energy reserves are running low. It’s not dangerous and if you don’t get something to eat instantly, you won’t suffer. And there is no benefit to trying to avoid it by constantly snacking and eating all the time. Doing this will only dull your senses and make it more difficult for you to tune into your body when it actually is hungry.
In order to be healthier and able to eat all foods in moderation, it’s important to eat when your body is really hungry. Generally speaking the three squares a day + snacks rule is far too much food for the average person. It’s important to remember that our bodies only require refueling every 6-9 hours. This is the amount of time that food remains in your stomach after a meal. If you feel the urge to eat more often than that, your hunger is not physical. It’s emotional.
Sandy’s Picture of Her Emotional Hunger
I have a client who works out of her home, building websites for people. To maintain her privacy, we’ll call her Sandy. One day Sandy said, “I have realized that I not only eat food but do other things to distract me to get me out of my feelings.”
She explained that many times throughout the day she will be sitting in her offfice and feeling frustrated or bored with the project at hand and all of a sudden she is hit with cravings for food that come out of nowhere.
The way that it plays out for her is that it starts out as a visual image in her thoughts. In her mind’s eye, she first sees a flash image of a food that she wants. In one instance, she described a craving for a cereal bar.
Next in her mind’s eye, she sees herself opening the door to her kitchen cabinet and getting out a cereal bar and eating it.
The image continues to repeat itself over and over in her head and it gains momentum by getting more intensely colored and brighter. Sandy tries to ignore the craving, by rearranging her desk, or surfing the web, or going back to work, but inevitably her thoughts continually turn back to the images flashing in her head.
If she continues to try to ignore the image, it gets stronger. And it takes on a new character and intensity by becoming audible. In her imagination, she can often hear herself say, “I’m hungry. I wanna eat.”
Soon after, unable to resist the temptation to ignore her thoughts any longer, she feels compelled to leave whatever task is at hand, to satisfy her urge to get something to eat.
She finds herself doing exactly what she envisioned in her imagination. She walks down the steps to her kitchen, opens her cabinet and reaches for the cereal bar and eats it. Then once, having eaten the food, she begins a cycle of feeling guilty, weak-willed and blaming herself.
Before I taught Sandy how to deal with this and why she was experiencing it, she felt certain that she was a victim of her own gluttony.
Does this happen to you too?
First like I tell all my clients, you need to know that this is not a consequence of being undisciplined or lacking any will power.
If your goal is to eat less, there’s a reason why you’re craving food when you’re not hungry. It’s the same reason why diets don’t work for most people.
You Haven’t Failed at Dieting, Dieting Has Failed You!
It’s probably no secret to you that diets don’t work. Back in April 2007, a research study was done at UCLA, combining 31 individual trial studies of people who had lost weight on diets. Their progress had been tracked for nearly 5 years. After analyzing the results of the findings, it was discovered that up to 98% of all people who lost weight on diets regained everything that they had lost within 2-5 years.
The lead author of the study, Traci Mann, Ph.D concluded that diets are not the best way to lose weight, and that over the long term they would likely fail. She suggested that the reason for this failure was the following:
Diets fail to address the emotions that push you to eat when you’re not hungry.
Because diets keep you focused on all the wrong things, they keep you thinking like a fat person, focusing constantly on your weight, obsessing over everything that goes in your mouth, how much food, how many fat grams, the number of calories and all the other details that prevent you from ever being able to have a healthy, happy, balanced relationship with food.
Because diets keep you feeling so dependent on their rules, you never learn how to master food in order to feel safe around it. And the more you think about certain foods as being restricted because they are fattening or unhealthy, the more you want them and when you give in to these cravings, you feel shameful and guilty. Diets are really just a binge waiting to happen.
Food Isn’t What You Really Want
Your cravings are really unmet emotional needs in disguise. When your brain gets triggered with the urge to eat, it is not because you lack will power or discipline, it is an instinctual survival-based response to dealing with your stress. Your desire is not really to eat the food, but to recreate the happy emotions that you have associated with the foods you enjoy. As an emotional eater, your brain is wired to recognize that eating those foods will ease your stress. During those times when you overeat, forgive yourself, let it go and move on, being willing to begin again, and again, and again.
So what’s the common denominator here? That’s right. It’s your emotions. Because your emotions can either push you onward toward success or leave you in a puddle of tears on the floor.
Your emotions are so crazy powerful that they determine every aspect of your life.
Like chemical storms in your brain, they cause a surge of hormones and chemicals to be released in the body and unless you know how to turn the tide, and what to do when you’re facing the storm, they’ll sink you everytime.
Want to know more about how to handle that urge to eat by dealing with your emotions so that you can feel safe around any and all foods?
Let me show you another way to handle your emotional eating. There is a much gentler and more effective alternative to dieting.
On January 8, I’m going to be doing a free introductory teleclass entitled, “Tap into Self Acceptance” to promote my next Lovin’ the Skin You’re In Program starting on January 15. To register, click on the link below:
How many times do you struggle with overwhelming feelings that push you to eat?
You could be having a perfectly great day and all of a sudden something happens to throw you off kilter and you find yourself desperately craving food.
A phone call, a suspicion roused, an upcoming confrontation, a bill arrives in the mail, a painful memory, a difficult client, a disappointment, a computer glitch, a bad weigh in, a fat day, a fight with your husband, a face off with your son, grieving a loss, an argument, fearing for your job, a rejection, a hurtful comment, a nasty look, a bounced check, coping with difficult people, living with and enduring emotional or physical pain–
To your stressed out emotions and exhausted body, these are all very good and valid reasons to eat.