Emotional Eating

Do you control emotional eating or does emotional eating control you? The secret to control emotional eating is to recognize and feel the emotion. Sounds easy but... the truth is that most of us are emotional cripples. We try to ignore our feelings, pretend that they don't bother us, pretend they don't exist, think that feeling certain emotions are beneath us, believe that feeling certain emotions will adversely affect our health... Emotional eating is the answer to any emotion whether it be boredom, upset, anger, frustration, confusion, uncertainty, depression, happiness, excitement, joy, malaise... To get to the heart of allowing you to feel an emotion write an affirmation about the emotion such as: "I like to feel bored." Then write down all the reasons why you feel the statement is untrue or a lie. You might have four or five reasons. Do this for every emotion--yes even happiness--and you'll have discovered all the reasons that really keep you from feeling the emotion. You then need to challenge each reason. For instance, "I like to feel angry." Your responses might be: • "Anger is beneath me." • "It's no good to get angry--my blood pressure will go up" • "They will know that they got to me." • "To be angry is stupid." First you might think back to the origin of these beliefs. Are they "hand-me-downs" from your parents or someone you emulated? Or at some point as a youngster, did you have a problem with anger? If you can trace the origin of the emotion and take a moment to analyze the person from who you acquired that belief, you'll discover that the person was somewhat crippled when it came to anger. That anger actually ran that person's life. What was missing from your education is that the moment you allow yourself to feel (experience) an emotion it disappears; and this is true for all emotions. And that's wonderful news. So rather than resisting an emotion or pretending it's not there, it's important to get beyond your beliefs about emotions. As you allow you to feel the emotion your need to dilute the emotion with food disappears. A progressive approach to managing weight involves asking important questions "What is missing? Why are you not getting the results you've been promised?" It is clearly insane to keep dieting when the results are so poor. It's more important to gain a grasp on how to handle emotional eating--eating emotional stress than it is to read the scale. Besides focusing on the scale doesn't empower you to be a better more enlightened person, whereas learning how to overcome emotional eating empowers you in all aspects of your life. If you're a sales person, you'll be a better sales person. If you're an assembly line worker, you'll be a better assembly line worker; a mother, a better mother... Overall, you'll build self worth and find that what you really want to eat is far more nutritious and less in quantity than you ever before imagined possible.