Comfort eating says more about relationships with food than it does about appetites.
Eating for comfort is the result of dealing with a negative experience or emotional issue with food.
Sadness, depression, anger, fear and stress are just a few emotions that can trigger comfort eating.
Eating instantly suppresses negative emotions but does little for the underlying causes of comfort eating. Comfort eating is a real issue for Empaths and Intuits. There is so much negativity in the world and so many use food as a drugging mechanism without awareness its being used as such.
You can begin to change your relationship to foods with the following processes. Enjoy. Go ahead, change your life today. Food is the key to changing your entire experiences in life! Promise.
1. Focus on being aware of when you eat and why. Before you eat anything, make sure you are actually hungry and not bored, scared or angry. Ask yourself if you are hungry or if you are bored. Are you reaching to find something that feels safe and gives you instant gratification or are you honestly hungry and your body is asking for nutrients? Game changer in awareness.
2. Don't diet. Diets fail because they do not address the root cause of why you eat for comfort. As long as you avoid the real reasons for choosing to eat comfort and processed foods, you will continue to slip up. Forget dieting and force yourself to deal with why you're comfort eating!
3. Eat sensibly and don't deprive yourself of favorite foods. Eliminate junk food, sugars and processed foods from your diet. In fact, you should remove them from your kitchen. Don't eat a bland, boring diet, though. Try a variety of fresh vegetables and fruits and find healthy food that tastes good. Don't deny yourself favorite foods, though. Allow yourself to have them occasionally.
4. Find healthy ways to deal with stress, anxiety, fear and anger. Exercise, walks in nature, adequate rest, reading book, talking with friends and therapy are some ways for coping with your emotions that lead to comfort eating.
5. Make peace with food and create an alternative to eating. The key to beat the habit of comfort eating is to isolate what you're feeling, or what is triggering the urge to eat, and find another way to deal with it. Take a walk, call a friend, do push ups, chew gum, drink water or listen to music instead of eating. Push through the emotion or boredom and try not to think about food. Practice! Practice! Practice!
6. Realize food will not bring you any kind of lasting happiness. The comfort you feel from eating is a passing pleasure and is only continuing a vicious cycle of self harm. Not to mention, it can actually create more anxiety and fearful low emotions. When you reach for sugar filled, processed foods, you are adding a chemical storm to your already stressed nervous system.
7. Focus on being happy, or content, every day without emotional eating. Realize that there are things you simply can't control and there are ways we can learn to cope and move through the difficulties that negative experience and emotions can have on us. Food can act like an addiction for many emotional eaters because it calms them down and makes them feel better. From this perspective, food should be approached like an addiction because it solves nothing and generally only makes you feel worse after you indulge.
8. Find a coach that feels right for you to be vulnerable with. Food is information. It is the building block to a healthy body, and healthy mind and a healthy relationship to everything in this life. Learning to not beat yourself up for feelings you have and finding empowerment in growth and education around choices you can make to feel your best is courageous and one of the most loving things you can do for yourself.
9. Be patient and take it slow. Real health and commitment to eating a Whole Foods 80/20 lifestyle is not going to happen over night. It will happen, and with your commitment and tolerance with yourself and you begin to truly implement this aspect of self love for yourself, you will feel confidence and vitality set in, in time.
In Health ~
Angela