Mindful Questions: Stop Emotional Eating For Good

☐ Ask yourself simply, "Why am I eating?"

Be honest with your answer.

Emotional eating (or stress eating) is using food to make yourself feel better- eating to satisfy emotional needs, rather than to satisfy physical hunger (www.helpguide.org)

☐ Ask yourself what exactly it is that you are eating.

This is an easy question to answer if you are about to eat a banana, a broiled piece of fish, and other foods found in nature.

It is sometimes virtually impossible to answer that question when you try to decipher exactly what makes up highly processed food.

☐ Ask yourself how you will feel after you eat?

You have probably had regrets and frustration after eating unhealthy junk food before.

Being honest with yourself about how you know a particular food will make you feel is important.

☐ Ask yourself, "How will this food help my long-term health?"

If you are trying to lose weight, or improve your health and wellbeing in some other way, thinking long-term can help you avoid the short-term effects of bad eating habits.

☐ Ask yourself if a smaller portion would suffice.

This gets you thinking about the core reason for your eating.

There's nothing wrong with eating a brownie or piece of cake every now and then, but do you really need 6 pieces or more?

☐ Ask yourself, "Am I about to binge on junk food as a way to punish myself?"

Turning to the food you know is not good for you is one way you may be punishing yourself for some perceived mistake or failure.

When eating is your primary emotional coping mechanism-when your first impulse is to eat whenever you’re stressed, upset, angry, lonely, exhausted, or bored-you will get stuck in an unhealthy cycle (www.helpguide.org).

Real Hunger Vs. Emotional Hunger and What it Means to Healthy Eating

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when eating healthy is learning how to properly manage hunger.

If you can learn to manage your hunger properly, then you are well on your way to healthy eating.

Real Hunger

Real hunger refers to the actual feelings of hunger that you experience when your body truly needs food.

Real hunger refers to the feelings you get when you absolutely need food.

When you are suffering from real hunger, you will know it. You will likely get sharp hunger cramps. Your mind will be consumed with getting food and nothing else, you won’t be able to concentrate on anything else.

Because of how easy it is to get food and how much food is available to us, very few people ever truly experience real hunger anymore unless they are purposely denying themselves food as part of a fad diet.

The most effective method for managing real hunger is to practice mindful eating. Mindful eating is basically a strategy that relies on smart portion control (to avoid overeating) combined with slow eating.

Believe it or not, slow eating actually does manage to satisfy your hunger more than scoffing down your food.

Applying mindful eating is easily the most effective way to curb your feelings of real hunger.

Emotional Hunger

Emotional hunger refers to instances where you may feel hungry but isn’t because your body is demanding food, instead it’s because your mind is making you think that you need food.

Your mind is definitely powerful enough to make you think that you are hungry, even when you really aren’t in desperate need of food.

There are a variety of factors that can result in emotional hunger. By far the most common cause is boredom.

When you get bored, you may turn to food to try and alleviate your boredom. You may mistake the feelings of boredom for feelings of hunger and assume that you need to eat to cure your hunger.

Another common cause of emotional hunger is a habit. When you eat your meals at the same time every day, you may find yourself getting “hungry” around that time, even though your body isn’t actually craving food.

There are some telltale signs that you are suffering from emotional hunger and not real hunger.

The first sign is if you have eaten recently (within the last few hours). It takes your body a while to digest food, so if you are feeling hungry after having eaten recently, then it is unlikely to be real hunger.

Another sign is if you are just sitting around doing nothing and suddenly start feeling hungry. That is a good sign that you are suffering from boredom-induced hunger.

Finally, if you truly want to tell if you are suffering from emotional hunger, drink a glass of cold ice water and see if the hunger subsides. If it does, it is emotional hunger and not real hunger.

Mindful Eating Vs. Mindless Eating

Mindful Eating

☐ Thinking about WHY you want to eat

☐ Eating meals at set times of the day

☐ Knowing the difference between physical hunger and head hunger

☐ Eating when noticing hunger signals from the body

☐ Eating foods based on how healthy they are

☐ Thinking about where your food comes from

☐ Listening to your body and stopping eating when full

☐ Feeling comfortable to stop when you're satisfied

☐ Taking time over your meal

☐ Focusing on your food when you eat

☐ Practicing self-care and wellness of mind, body and spirit

Mindless Eating

☐ Just eating without thinking about it

☐ Often eating foods at random times or skipping some meals

☐ Just eating whenever you "feel" like it

☐ Eating based on emotional feelings like stress, sadness or boredom

☐ Eating foods based on how comforting they feel

☐ Not thinking about where your food comes from

☐ Eating past the feeling of fullness

☐ Never being satisfied, or feeling compelled to clean your plate

☐ Eating food in a hurry

☐ Being distracted while you eat (e.g. watching TV)

☐ Constantly letting stress get the best of you

Mindful Eating: Healthy Food List

☐ Avoid –Sugar

Sugar is a health destroyer and should be avoided. Look for foods that list sugar as an ingredient, and avoid them.

Understand that food manufacturers list sugar under many ingredients that end in the suffix -ose, and this is just an underhanded way of trying to hide the presence of sugar.

Replace sugar with – Natural Sweeteners

There are naturally healthy sugars and other sweeteners in nature. Fruits contain healthy sugars, and they are accompanied by dietary fiber, minerals, and nutrients your body needs.

You may also replace refined sugar with crushed Stevia leaves, but avoid Stevia that comes in crystallized form, since there are often unhealthy additives present. Raw, organic honey is another natural sweetener.

☐ Avoid – Salt

Salt is not bad in and of itself. Your body actually needs salt. However, processed foods make it almost a guarantee that you are getting way too much salt to be healthy.

Replace salt with – Natural Herbs

Any natural herb, such as oregano, basil, rosemary, and others, provides healthy flavor. They have zero calories and zero carbs, and zero chance of jacking up your salt content to an unhealthy level.

☐ Avoid – Energy drinks, sodas, and retail fruit juices.

Aside from usually having criminally high levels of sugar, canned or bottled fruit juices, sodas, and energy drinks contain artificial colorings and other additives and toxins that are extremely bad for you.

Replace with – Coconut Water

Green tea, other herbal teas, water, and coconut water are healthy alternatives to sugar-filled, store-bought beverages. You can also make flavorful, nutritious juices and smoothies.

Just make sure the fruits and vegetables you use have not been frozen in a solution with sugar, salt, and other harmful ingredients.

☐ Avoid – Dairy milk

Dairy milk has been found to weaken bones rather than strengthen them and has been linked to higher than normal rates of cancer and heart disease.

Replace dairy milk with – Coconut milk

Coconut milk and almond milk are healthy alternatives to dairy milk. In many cases, they deliver more vitamin D than dairy milk and contain other nutrients your body requires.

Read your food labels, and avoid any coconut or almond milk with added sugar.

☐ Avoid – Highly processed foods

Highly processed foods and fast food, those that you usually purchase in a bag, can, box or wrapper, are almost never good for you.

Replace processed foods with – Plant-Based Foods

Eat predominantly fresh plant-based foods, fruits, nuts, berries, and vegetables. Eat them raw whenever you can, as close to their natural state as possible.

This way you get nutrients, vitamins, and minerals, instead of man-made chemicals toxins and poisons.

☐ Avoid – White Rice/White Flour

Simple grains and simple carbohydrates like white flour, pasta, and white rice. These foods have little to no nutrition, and your body converts them and stores them as fat.

Replace with – Whole Grains,

Foods like quinoa, barley, buckwheat, and brown rice.

You will also find that the healthy and versatile cauliflower can replace rice when ground down to a similar consistency, and cauliflower can also be used in place of potatoes in a lot of meals.

4 Ways to Fight Mindless Emotional Eating

1. Don't restrict yourself

Binge eating normally happens when you have restricted yourself for a period of time.

If you're on a strict diet, for example, you might spend a week craving something sugary, but not allowing yourself to have it. When these cravings build-up, they turn into one huge craving that you then feel the need to satisfy.

Since you haven't eaten any bad foods in a few days, it's easy to feel like you deserve to overeat in order to compensate for the lack of food you've allowed yourself.

2. Ease your stresses

Some of us binge eat when we're feeling stressed, and if you're so worried and anxious that you don't even care about the results of overeating, this can become dangerous.

Make a list of the things that you're worried or stressed about and try to get rid of these anxieties in various ways.

You can do this by exercising to let off some steam, hanging out with some friends, or chatting to somebody close to you about your problems.

3. Don't have cheat days

Most of the binge eating we do while we're 'dieting' comes from cheat days – days during which we allow ourselves to step out of line.

However, the problem with cheat days is that we're allowing ourselves an entire day to 'cheat' and step away from our otherwise healthy way of eating.

Rather than having whole days where you allow yourself to binge, let yourself have a treat every couple of days to keep the cravings at bay and help you feel like you're not being restricted all the time.

4. Don't celebrate weight loss by eating

We've all done it – we lose a couple of pounds and celebrate by giving ourselves that cake we've had our eye on for a while or that extra cookie after dinner.

Even going out for an unhealthy meal with friends at the weekend can damage your progress for the week, so reward yourself in other ways, such as buying clothes and makeup or going on a date night to the cinema with your partner.