If only food were just that—food. Oh, that’s something our jeans would really like. However, the problem is that food is often utilized for purposes other than nourishing the body. For some reason, when we’re feeling down, bored, empty, or stressed, we turn to comfort foods like ice cream, pizza, cookies, potato chips, and casseroles to help us feel better.
RELATED: 4 Expert-Proven Strategies To Overcome Emotional Overeating
Do you recognize the source of your hunger? If you’re hungry, here’s a GPS to help you find it. You’d think it would be simple. There’s more on the way.
Physical hunger manifests itself below the chin, whereas emotional hunger is experienced above it. As opposed to physical hunger, which can be anticipated by planning ahead, emotional hunger strikes without warning. While deep in thought while writing an essay, suddenly, you realize you’re ravenous.
Specific food cravings, particularly if they are intense and pull you toward eating immediately, point to hunger higher up the body. You can know your GPS is pointing north (that’d be above your neck toward your thoughts) when that’s coupled with an unpleasant feeling tied to a painful event.
Is the candy being shoved into your mouth mindlessly, or are you consuming it without discernible intention? Is that cupcake almost flying into your mouth? Really hungry? You’re talking about something above your neck.
Do you continue to eat even if you know your stomach is full? Emotional eating, that’s what you’ve got going on.
Now that you’ve realized you’ve overeaten, you feel guilty about doing something you started doing to alleviate negative emotions like depression, tension, anxiety, and loneliness. What a contradiction, eating due to feelings of stress or anger above the neck!
Are you prepared to swap out your dysfunctional, emotional eating habits with those based on your stomach’s true physical hunger? Are you prepared to identify the hunger that sneaks up on you, leaving you open to a variety of foods to nourish your body, manifests itself with a rumbling, gnawing feeling in your stomach, and waits patiently until you can eat? Good!
When you’re full, you don’t feel hungry again for hours, but when you go without food for a while, you start to feel weak and famished. That is true starvation.
Even if you maintain an emotional diary for just a week, recording your thoughts and feelings about food may be a powerful tool for identifying and overcoming irrational eating.
Record your feelings and thoughts before, during, and after each meal. Consider if you really feel hungry. Why do I feel the way I do? Tell me what it is that I need. Can you help me figure out how to provide this demand?
Create and use your own “hunger scale” from 0, starving to the point of feeling sick, to 3, hungry with a grumbling stomach, to 7, feeling full and slightly uncomfortable, to 10, feeling sick and extremely uncomfortable.
What’s eating you isn’t what you eat, but rather the emotion(s) that cause you to consume. Master some other strategies for dealing with your emotions.
Doing something useful like going on a stroll, chatting to a close friend, working out, sleeping or anything else will help. You might convince yourself that it’s only a want that will pass by telling yourself things like “I can endure experiencing pain” or “Just because I believe that’s what I need, doesn’t mean it actually is.”
Here is how to counteract the purely mental component of that unreasonable eating pattern:
There are four things you should do before you eat:
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