How to Overcome Terrible Emotional Eating

Eating is a main part of our life as we eat to survive. Our body needs sufficient nutrients deriving from food to help maintain healthy cell metabolism and also to boost the immune system to its utmost level. Sometimes, without realizing, an innocent bite causes you go overboard with your eating habits resulting in gaining extra weight. One health issue arising from this problem is unhealthy emotional eating.

Often, the problem of unhealthy eating habits cannot be viewed as normal as it begins in your mind, allowing physical stress to have an impact upon your body. That means the stress mentioned here can take its toll towards your daily life. When your defense system is being compromised, it will significantly affect your health as do your emotions.

Life is up and down, and you could not expect every day to be a good day as there may sometimes be bad days that bring your emotions down. When you let your emotions come into play, you start turning to food for comfort in searching for a coping mechanism that won’t hurt you physically. Eating pleasurable foods may not cause any significant injury, but similar to exercising they can stimulate the release of endorphins. The more you eat, the more you feel better. When you are too emotional, eating pleasurable foods like chips and cookies help relieve your stress instead of seeking solution to the problem (s). The health issue of emotional or compulsive eating does not just end with the scale as it begins inside your mind, and may lead to a death or a physical abuse.

Are You an Emotional Eater?

The obvious impact of being an emotional eater is gaining weight. Eating (too much) more than your body needs will harm your health in a long run. Now, look into other areas of your life that lead you to compulsive eating as below:

1. Has any traumatic event happened in your life recently or in the previous year?
2. Are you faced with a problem that you are struggling to find a solution for?
3. Are you experiencing stress lately at home, at school or at work?

If you answer “yes” to any of these questions it means that you might be an emotional eater. You eat too much especially when it is not necessary and you do not feel hungry at the time. In this matter, you tend to choose those so called comfort foods which can be divided into three categories: (1) Sugary foods: ice-cream, candy, lollipop, cake, chocolate, pop corn, cookies, doughnuts, etc. (2) High fat foods: fried foods, French fries, etc. and (3) High carb foods: mashed potatoes, cheese, macaroni, chips, etc.