How to stop emotional eating: Saying goodbye to food addiction and weight gain

How to stop emotional eating? This is one question that we keep asking ourselves time and again but we can’t seem to find a satisfactory answer. Do you know why? This is because you can’t possibly stop it all of a sudden. Like any other addiction, food addiction also takes time to develop and longer to loosen the shackles. It’s a slow process where you need to plan well, do a lot of self-study and try to understand why you developed this habit, control your mood swings, take a hold of your emotions, develop alternative behavior for binge eating, acknowledge backsliding, persevere to achieve and reward yourself when the efforts start paying. Emotional eating is completely psychological and hence the first thing that you need to do is start from within.

If you really want to find an answer to this question - how to stop emotional eating then you need to delve deep within and be honest with yourself. Find out what makes you crave for food. Do you reach for that bag of chips when you are stressed out? Or, munching into fried chicken calms you down and makes you feel better? What is that emotion that triggers your urges to eat something? Food addiction also has a scientific reason behind it and you can deal with it only when you have complete understanding about your mental and emotional responses.

To know how to stop emotional eating you have to go to the root of the issue. Anger, stress, anxiety, fear – these are the most common causes of emotional eating. Do you know why? When you experience these emotions, your brain releases a stress hormone which triggers food cravings, apart from other harmful effects on your metabolism and digestion. So, the first step you can take is to prevent the stress hormone from being released at all. This won’t happen in a day. Practicing an alternative reaction to the same situation will take time but once you develop this habit of reacting positively to a negative emotion, you will feel calm from within and food addiction will not come back to haunt you.

While internal changes are important for getting rid of food addiction, external modifications are also equally desirable to deal with emotional eating. For instance, rid your house of all kinds of junk food and keep only fresh, low fat, unprocessed, low calories food. So even if you feel like munching, it will not be anything that triggers weight gain. Since one of the most feared results of emotional eating is becoming overweight, you have to take care of the kind of food you keep at your place.

On the flipside of trying to control food addiction, if you stop munching your favorite chips or gulping down a scoop of ice creams all of a sudden, it may backslide dangerously. So, give yourself occasional treats. Take out a few pieces of chips on a bowl and have that instead of pouring into the bag. Similarly, break one small piece from the bar of chocolate and have it instead of biting directly from the bar. If you are able to act according to the above suggestions you will find the answer to the question, how to stop emotional eating.

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