Emotional Eating.

 

Most of us have experienced emotional eating in our lifetime. Most of us have probably experienced it within the past month! You know it is happening because you aren’t getting the usual hunger cues from your body but you are eating anyways.

 

Maybe you are stuck at an airport and have a long wait, so you grab a bag of chips. You’re feeling bored.

Maybe you are under pressure at work and you feel unable to cope with the extra hours or disrespect from a boss or coworker. The fast food place across the street should be able to fix that… but I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean to order two of everything.

Maybe you are home alone and the silence of your home is overwhelming and you feel disconnected, so you grab a glass of wine.

Maybe you walked past a mirror and saw the extra pounds your body is holding and you felt shame, so you ate a box of cereal. The whole box.

Or maybe your significant other berated you and you’re left sitting in shock, feeling rejected and unworthy. So you ate anything you could find until you couldn’t eat one...more...bite.

 

These were all me. And these may even be you. Emotional overeating is a real thing that many of us deal with. These choices were made out of boredom, stress, shame, or rejection. When you look into your life, instances of emotional eating may be hard to detect, such as the bag of chips at the airport, or a snack midday at the office. They also may be waves that crash over you, leaving you sitting at the bottom of your fridge, sinking deeper and deeper into self pity and regret.

 

A couple years ago, I was suffering from General Anxiety Disorder and the onset of depression. I ate close to 450 (yes you read that right) mini Luna Bars while hiding in my bedroom on a Netflix binge to block out the fact that I was gaining over 25 lbs in three months. I can promise you the Luna Bars didn’t help - they aided me in masking the shame I had felt at that time in my life.

 

My goal today is not to give you a foolproof cure for emotional eating as I feel I could probably take many blogs to address all the different strategies and stages. I’m not a psychologist or eating specialist of any kind, but I’ve been at the bottom. I want to share with you how I found my way out.

 

I want to introduce you to a model that I was taught by master Life Coach Brooke Castillo called the Self Coaching Model. I will discuss this in greater detail more in a future post, but I know it will help you to reclaim your emotional power as this is how I was able to do it.

 

The concept is that the thoughts we have in our head create an emotion in our body. Our emotions then cause us to do a behavior or action and these repeated actions determine our results. Most of the time when we are emotionally eating, we believe our actions (the overeating) are determining our results (weight gain). While that is true, we didn’t look far enough back through the model. Those feelings of self doubt, shame, rejection, and loneliness we are feeling are causing us to eat. Let’s look back one step further - the feelings we are experiencing are triggered by our thoughts. Ready for the good news? We have the ability to direct our thoughts.

 

When you walk in the door of your house after work, your brain might say, “I’ve had a hard day, I deserve this.”

When someone insults you or doesn’t include you in a girls’ night out, your brain might say “I’m not worthy”.

When you are home alone and waiting for the time to pass before bedtime, your brain might say “I want this glass of wine, this day was too stressful”.

 

All these thoughts we are having are triggering us to feel EMOTIONS that are causing us to ACT and begin eating when we are not hungry, even if we just ate dinner. Working on changing your thoughts is a much deeper concept that we will work on together at another time, but for now, I want you to experience what Brooke Castillo calls “The Sacred Moment”, or as we’ll call it “the moment”.

 

This is the exact moment you feel yourself having these thoughts right before you have the feeling. Most of us experience this moment over and over on a day to day basis and are not aware of its significance or even aware of it even happening. I want you to hear those thoughts coming and take a moment to pause and recognize that in this moment, you are having a thought which is triggering an emotion and causing you to make a choice.

 

Being aware of our own thinking is distinctly human and because we have this ability, we have the capacity to use it. Today’s goal is not to have you stop emotional eating forever, but to become aware of the thoughts we are having right before we make those choices.

 

I found the most helpful tool was my journal. Each time I found myself craving a chocolate bar out of nowhere with no hunger cues in sight, I would recognize that this moment of thought-emotion-action was occurring and do a thought download. A thought download is when you take a piece of paper and write down ALL of the thoughts you are having at that moment in time. The reason I recommend writing is because putting it on paper allows you to see the thoughts more concretely and enables you to discover thoughts you may not have known you were thinking!

 

I’m not asking you to necessarily make different decisions today with the food choice or amount of food you end up eating, but I’m asking you to become aware of that “sacred moment” and the thoughts that are causing it. Becoming aware of the thoughts we are thinking is the first step we can take on the path toward changing them.

 

Putting that ‘pause’ between the thought-feeling moment and the action in combination with a thought download has allowed me to stop overeating and become much more conscious for the reasons I choose to eat. Many times, recognizing this moment alone has allowed me to choose a healthier choice and has given me the freedom I needed to start my journey out from under emotional eating.

 

You can do it, just begin.

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