Weight Loss - Change Your Mindset
/Emotional Eating - How a Positive Mindset Can Support Weight Loss
When it comes to weight loss, there’s one crucial part that many diet programs miss – changing your mindset.
You see, when people go on diets, they are not addressing the emotional triggers that are behind their weight issues.
Even if they try different diet programs or become exercise fanatics, as soon as another emotional crisis arises, the weight creeps back up.
The beliefs you have about yourself are preventing you from feeling good about yourself leading to a range of eating issues like emotional eating.
Emotional eating is a way of distracting you from feeling painful emotions such as anger, fear, loneliness, shame or sadness. Many of these emotions may have been first triggered as a child.
The emotional causes behind the eating problems need to be resolved if you want to gain control of your eating habits.
You can break the cycle of emotional eating by changing your mindset and creating lifestyle habits that support your emotional wellbeing .
How do we become addicted to food?
If you are prone to emotional eating, you tend to crave junk food and feel out of control around food. You use food to suppress negative emotions.
Food fills that emotional void inside you. It makes you feel better instantly, but the effects are not long-lasting.
The feelings or thoughts that triggered the eating behaviour remain, so you need more food to fill the growing void inside you.
Compulsive eaters get caught in a vicious cycle of eating to fix their emotional problems and then feeling guilty for overeating.
Emotional hunger can’t be satisfied with food. You will only end up feeling worse – because of all the extra calories you consumed.
Emotional and physical hunger
If you regularly use food to deal with your feelings, it can be tricky to know if your hunger is emotional or physical. Yet, they are quite different.
Emotional hunger makes you crave junk foods or sugary snacks. The desire for food is in your mind rather than in your stomach. After eating, you end up feeling regret, guilt or shame.
Physical hunger, on the other hand, gives your body clear signals, like hunger pangs in the stomach, to tell you that you are hungry. You eat until you are full and are less likely to feel guilty afterwards.
What are the triggers?
Recent studies show that the average American has gained up to 16 pounds since the lockdown started. It seems that people are using food to relieve stress, anxiety or boredom.
You can put a stop to emotional eating by becoming more aware of the triggers. What feelings make you want to reach out for comfort food?
Stress is a major trigger for emotional eating. When under stress, your body produces high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. You crave salty, sweet and fried foods, which provide instant pleasure.
Negative self-talk is a destructive habit related to bingeing. It leads to a cycle of emotional eating to distract you from feeling bad about yourself. But it only makes you feel worst because now you feel guilt or shame.
Food could be a way to keep you busy when you are bored - to fill the void of emptiness or lack of purpose.
Emotional eating can also be triggered by childhood habits or social influences – such as families or friends that encouraged you to overeat when you were younger.
Emotional eating diary
One way to keep track of your emotional triggers is with a diary. Any time you reach out for comfort food, write down any feelings or events that triggered it. What caused you to eat? How did you feel before and after you ate?
Before long, you may begin to see an emotional eating pattern. You may recognise that certain people or situations trigger emotional eating. When you become aware of the triggers, you can find better ways to cope with the emotions.
How to stop emotional eating
Awareness is the first step to healing. When you are aware of the triggers, you have the power to make a choice.
Next time you feel the urge to reach out for comfort food, pause for five minutes. What are you feeling? What can you do to soothe yourself or express the emotion in a healthier way?
Go for a walk, call a friend, spend time out in nature, or listen to your favourite webcast.
Meditation can be highly effective in helping you to stop overeating. Just ten minutes of meditation can reduce your stress levels and influence your eating habits. An added bonus is that it will have a positive effect on all other areas of your life as well.
Creative activities also help to distract you from eating. Take up a creative hobby - like photography, crafts or painting.
As you begin to use your willpower to cut out compulsive eating habits, it becomes easier to stop.
Create healthy lifestyle habits
Change your eating habits by replacing high-calorie foods with a low-calorie alternative to satisfy your cravings. Sip on a slimming herbal tea, which can also help calm you down. Raw vegetable juices or protein non-dairy smoothies can energise you instantly. If you want to chew, munch on raw vegetables or fruit. Replace all processed foods with natural food choices.
Exercise is the best mood enhancer. Even just ten minutes a day of exercise can lift your mood and improve your stress levels.
When you don’t get enough sleep, your body craves sugary foods for snacks. Your food cravings reduce when you get plenty of rest.
If you can learn to express your feelings in more positive ways, it will improve your relationship with yourself and others.
Hypnosis can support you to change your negative self-beliefs about you or your body image. It can also help you to create the lifestyle changes you need to break free from emotional eating patterns.
When you take responsibility for your health, from the inside out, you can completely transform the way you look and feel.
If you would like to know how hypnosis can help you on your weight loss journey, contact me at evaburbury@bigpond.com.
