How to Overcome Emotional Eating

How to Overcome Emotional Eating

How to Overcome Emotional Eating – 4 Tips To Let It Go For Good

Emotional eating can begin in childhood when food becomes your parents’ favourite tools of distraction and reward, wielded in response to various emotions and behaviours that you exhibited. As a baby, they silenced your cries with a bottle. As a child, they rewarded your good behaviour with candy, snacks, ice cream and various sugary desserts. As an adult, you may find yourself eating certain junk foods just because it reminds you of some happy childhood memory. – Huffpost

 

  • Do you eat more when you are feeling stressed?
  • Do you eat when you are not hungry or feeling full?
  • Do you eat to feel better? To soothe & calm yourself when sad, bored, etc?
  • Do you reward yourself with food often?
  • Do you feel powerless or out of control around food?

 

How to Overcome Emotional Eating – Difference Between Emotional Hunger and Physical Hunger

Physical Hunger

  • comes on gradually
  • can wait
  • is open to options – lots of things sound good
  • stops when you are full
  • eating to satisfy this hunger doesn’t make you feel bad

 

Emotional Hunger

  • comes on suddenly
  • feels like it needs to be satisfied instantly
  • craves specific comfort foods
  • isn’t satisfied with a full stomach
  • triggers feelings of guilt, powerlessness and shame

How to Overcome Emotional Eating  – Causes of Emotional Eating

  1. Stress – cortisol (stress hormone) triggers cravings for salty, sweet and high-fat foods – giving you a burst of energy and pleasure.
  2. Silencing uncomfortable emotions – numbing yourself with food so you can avoid feelings you would rather not have – anger, resentment, anxious, sad, lonely, shame.
  3. Boredom or emptiness – Fills a void for a short period of time.
  4. Childhood habit – rewards, nostalgia these can carry over to adult life.
  5. Social – overeat just because it’s there.

What To Do?

1.How to Overcome Emotional Eating – Identify Your Triggers – Keep a food and mood diary to track these. Identify them then backtrack.
What you ate or wanted to eat? What happened to set this up? How did you feel before you ate? What you felt as you were eating? How did you feel afterwards?

2. Find Other Ways To Feed Your Feelings – beyond food to meet your emotional needs. The keys to success are moving (dance, bike, swim, walk…), changing your focus (outside of yourself with music, friend, helping others, etc) and engaging in gratitude (get optimistic) are some universal tools.

Ideas are – Exhausted –> take a hot bath or spa, allow self to have quick nap, lay in sun outdoors & listen to nature; Lonely or down –> ring a fun friend, go for a walk with a friend or your dog, watch a comedy movie, crank up fun music; Anxious –> dance to your favourite song, go for a walk, do 15 minutes of yoga, take it out with a friend.

3. Pause When Cravings Hit – Take 5 before you mindlessly part-take – go outside and skip for 5 minutes, dance like a maniac to your favourite song, drink 2 glasses water, 30 sit-ups. This will interrupt your mindless pattern so you can exert your option to choose.

Remember it is key to learn to accept your feelings even the bad ones and remember you have control over your emotions…..a choice in each and every moment. An emotion lasts for 45 seconds you can choose to let it pass or hold onto it for 1 hour, 1 day, 1 year, a lifetime.
Allow yourself to feel uncomfortable emotions they can be scary but in reality, when we don’t obsess or suppress them, even the most difficult feeling subside relatively quickly and lose their power to control our attention.
Instead, opt for being present in the moment – feel it, smell it, hear it, see it. In opening up to our emotions, our lives become richer as they help us discover our deepest desires, fears, frustrations and the things that make us fulfilled and happy.

4. Prevention With Healthy Habits – Being physically strong, relaxed, well rested enables you to better handle what life throws at you. Living in overwhelm and exhaustion will send you straight to the fridge or pantry.

• Daily exercise – reduces stress, enhances mood, boosts energy levels, increases fitness
• Daily relaxation – schedule in 30 mins each day to relax, decompress, unwind. Recharge your batteries, break from responsibilities
• Connect with other – social activities, close relationships are essential to protect you from the negative effects of stress.
• Get at least 8 hours sleep – lack of sleep is linked to consuming more food and reduced satiety signals, plus increased stress levels.

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If you would like further information or help to formulate a diet plan which will reduce the urge to Emotional Eating BOOK HERE

 

Are You Suffering From Sensory Overload?

Are You Suffering From Sensory Overload?

Think back over your day so far. How much of it was spent in silence? As in no pumping background music, no chit chat, no incessant mental chatter in your head or a blazing podcast on your headphones. When were you last in the moment, with the wind on your face appreciating what is with no judgement and feeling truly grateful for the magic of life.

Chances are it’s been a while. It’s a common predicament these days. Often seconds after our alarm goes off, bang we are deep into social media feeds. Listening to music on our commute to work, watching videos at lunch, listening to podcasts on the way home, watching TV during dinner.

Sound familiar? The average person is often deprived of mental and physical silence. We are over-stimulated by a constant bombardment on all our sensory organs. It is the era of sensory overload!

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10 Tips To Get More Energy Naturally

10 Tips To Get More Energy Naturally

10 Tips To Get More Energy Naturally

  • Can’t be bothered?
  • Feeling overwhelmed?
  • Life feels too hard?
  • Running on empty?

Whenever, I start feeling flat for no good reason I step back and take stock.

Here’s what I usually find –

  • I’m being unkind to myself,
  • I’m unorganized with my food and time
  • I’ve let my nourishing rituals drop off
  • I haven’t planned anything to look forward to
  • I’m focusing on what’s not there instead of what is

Here’s 10 tips to Get More Energy Naturally –

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Natural Remedies for Insulin Resistance

Natural Remedies for Insulin Resistance

Natural Remedies for Insulin Resistance – Tired, Hungry, Gaining Weight? Want To Learn How To Make It All Stop?

 

Natural Remedies for Insulin Resistance – Have you been feeling tired, hungry and gaining weight? Hitting a wall in the afternoons and feeling “blahhh” more often than not? Maybe waking at night to go to toilet or feeling thirstier than normal?

These can be common signs of insulin resistance.

Did you know it is estimated 500,000 people in Australia suffer from undiagnosed insulin resistance? Most of them are unaware they have it and it just creeps up on them. I over hear them saying things like, “I think I’m just getting old” and leave it at that, like there is nothing you can do about it.

Well, that’s so not true! And it makes me even more determined to teach you otherwise. In truth, it’s a sign, your blood sugar levels are not as good as they should be. You don’t necessarily have diabetes, but you’re well on the way towards it.

Getting your blood sugar sorted, will mean you have less chance of getting diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, gaining weight or not being able to lose it, polycystic ovarian syndrome, breast cancer, and much more.

Eating in a way that balances your blood sugar, reduces inflammation and oxidative stress, and improves your liver detoxification is the key to preventing and reversing insulin resistance and diabetes. – Huffpost

Good news is, it’s not that hard to manage and heal. Let’s take a look at insulin resistance more closely and some Natural Remedies for Insulin Resistance.

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Holistic Life Coach Melbourne

Holistic Life Coach Melbourne

Holistic Life Coach Mornington – 10 Steps To Creating Life Balance

How to weigh up priorities to find peace and harmony.

 

1. BECOME AWARE

Draw a pie chart and section off the areas of your life: work, home, play, family, relaxation, meditation/exercise. Create a chart of how much time you’d like to give these areas. How unbalanced are these two versions?

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