Emotional Eating Will Cause Obesity

Emotional eating means turning to food for comfort -- not because you’re hungry. That bag of potato chips and those chocolate chip cookies may provide short-term relief when you’re feeling bored, lonely, anxious, frustrated, depressed, angry, or stressed. But emotional eating can also lead to overeating and unwanted weight gain. Experts estimate that 75% of overeating is a response to emotions. That’s three quarters of all over-weight people have an emotional eating problem. Even if you conquered the emotional problems, you probably still have the extra weight. Now you want to lose the weight, but you might still have those cravings from the days when you had those emotional problems.
The good news is that you can learn skills and alternative ways to cope with feelings of emotional distress so that you’re not reaching for unhealthy foods whenever you’re faced with a negative feeling.

When you know what situations and emotions prompt you to eat, you can come up with ways to steer clear of those traps. These food triggers will typically fall into five main categories.
• Social: Being encouraged by others to eat, or eating to fit in
Example: Co-worker wants you to go to lunch. They want to go to a burger joint and you want a salad. Have an alternative ready. A place where you can get the salad and they can get a burger.

• Emotional: Eating in response to unpleasant feelings, like fatigue and anxiety, or to fill the void due to loneliness
Example: Be ready for disappointment, If you don’t feel like being alone one night, call someone and meet with them. Go see a family member.

• Thoughts: Eating because of a negative self-image
Sometimes ice cream doesn’t help, Sometimes it’s better to talk out your problems with someone who knows how to help you.

• Situational: Eating because the opportunity is there, like when you see a food advertised or when you pass a bakery. You might also eat whenever you do certain activities, like going to the movies or watching TV.
Bad habits: All these are bad habits and it will take will power on your part. Just like someone who stops smoking, only you can stop snacking. I did it by only snacking on apples, mixed nuts and seeds. You can get tired of
snacking on the same thing but at least their healthy.

• Physiological: Eating in response to physical cues, such as a headache or an appetite increased because you skipped a meal.
Very important: When your trying to lose weight, never skip a meal. I was very successful losing weight by eating 6 small meals a day. Their only snack size, about 300 calories, but if you make each one nutritious you won’t get hungry.

To find out what causes your emotional eating, keep a food diary to write down what and when you eat as well as what why you eat. You should begin to see patterns fairly quickly.

How to Stop Emotional Eating

By the time you’ve identified a pattern, emotional eating has become a habit. Now you want to break that habit.
When you start to reach for food in response to an eating trigger, try one of the following activities instead.

• Read a good book or magazine, or listen to music.
• Go for a walk or jog.
• Take a bubble bath.
• Do deep breathing exercises.
• Play cards or a board game.
• Talk to a friend.
• Do housework, laundry, or yard work.
• Wash the car.
• Write a letter.
• Do any other pleasurable or necessary activity until the urge to eat passes.

It’s important you can separate craving of hunger from cravings driven by your emotions. When your trying to lose weight you never want to be hungry. You always want to plan small meals on regular intervals so you don’t get hungry. The trick is that you plan out the number of calories in each meal so you don’t exceed 1500 or 1800 calories a day depending on your size.