How to Avoid Emotional Eating Now and Later

Emotional eating is the eating that people do not when they are genuinely hungry but when they are feeling some kind of intense emotion. The emotion can be positive (happiness or excitement) or it can be negative (sadness or anger). Essentially, any intense emotion can trigger a round of this particular type of overeating. As you know, people attempt to run away from their feelings (or dull them or numb them) in all sorts of different ways, and overeating is only one of them. Fortunately, there are some specific steps you can take if you want to avoid engaging in this self-sabotaging behavior now and in the future. To learn these steps, please read this article.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

1. Approach eating in a mindful way. More specifically, each time you get ready to eat, ask yourself the following question: Am I genuinely, physically hungry right now, or am I eating because I feel an intense emotion and am I attempting to use the act of eating (or overeating) to escape from this disconcerting feeling state? In other words, am I eating just to numb (or take the edge off of) this intense feeling? If your answer to this question is that you are in fact eating because you are feeling physically hungry, this is great, and there is no need to move on to Step Two. However, if your honest answer is that you are eating (or overeating) in an attempt to dull or "press the mute button" on an intense feeling of some kind, please proceed to Step Two.

2. Since you have determined in Step One that you are in fact preparing to eat not because you are truly hungry but because you are trying to mute an intense emotion, take a breath, push yourself away from the table, and shift gears completely by getting up, walking around, taking a drink of water, or doing anything at all other than eating. Using this simple redirecting technique on a consistent basis, you will gradually start to break the spell of trying to numb your feelings with food.

3. After completing Step Two, your third step is to allow yourself to actually feel the emotion you have been trying to numb by overeating. If you are feeling sad about something, rather than overeating, allow yourself to cry or to talk about your challenging feelings with someone you love and trust. Similarly, if you are feeling happy about something, then rather than overeating to "celebrate," allow yourself to shout or dance or jump up and down to express your joy. In other words, allow yourself to truly experience your feelings in all their glorious or scary or thrilling intensity. Intense emotions can present a challenge to our sense of emotional equilibrium, but at the same time, they can also "wake us up" and make us feel more alive and engaged than ever.

Tips & Warnings

• Emotional eating need not be a "life sentence." It is simply a habit or a behavioral pattern, and much like any other destructive behavioral pattern, with enough time and effort, it can be stopped.