Are You An Emotional Eater?
If you are an emotional eater it’s time you realized emotional eating makes it impossible to achieve long term weight loss regardless of your desire, your hope or your intentions?
Each day when confronted with life’s challenges at work, with family or friends or any other upset or stress trigger of life the emotional eater often looks for a food as the cure all to feel better.
Could the need for a ‘food reward’ revert back to when as children our parents, with all good intention, used food to sooth us when we fell and scrapped our knee, a treat when we did something good or as a distraction when things were going wrong for us? As children we were able to burn off the negative calories but as adults we pack on the pounds.
Many emotional eaters share the same positive reasons for losing weight: to fit into their clothes, to be healthy, look better, feel better and/or have more energy. However, the emotional eater’s losing weight loss is further driven by expecting additional perks from losing weight. This expectation often sets them up for long term failure and a life of yo-yo dieting.
Emotional eaters think there will be a monumental shift in their lives and the issues they experience as overweight individuals will be better or fade away when they lose the weight.
They believe… when I am at my ideal weight I will have higher self-esteem, be in control over the food I eat, relationships will get better, I will love myself just as I am and the self-criticism will stop. Some go so far as to think their depression, mood swings and anxiety will be gone. Emotional eaters want their life to change for the better NOT just to enjoy a body change. However, when this does not happen they revert back to the need for food to make them feel good and the cycle of yo-yo dieting perpetuates.
Only when the emotional eaters adjusts their expectations and realizes the shift needs to occur first and then sustainable weight loss will follow. It is not the reverse. It is also important to establish a new, healthy relationship with food and not hold on to food as their quick escape when stress, sadness, disappointment or anger knocks at the door.
The emotional eater often sees food as a protector and an escape from everyday life and wants to eat as much as they want to mask the real issue they do not want or choose not to deal with.
The fact is this: It takes hard work to be able to discard the notion food is magic and to learn to find other non-food related ways to handle the stress of life.
Have a look through our site and let Skinny Times help you at least start to make that shift.
Attn: Emotional Eaters: We suggest you have a look at HeartMath whose mission is to help people bring their physical, mental and emotional systems into balanced alignment with their heart’s intuitive guidance. Helping you become “who you truly are.”
