Sadly, emotional eating can interrupt your healthy eating and prevent you from losing weight on a consistent basis. Too often our efforts to lose weight come unstuck when we indulge in emotional eating. Using these tips and tricks can help you control your emotional eating, stay on your calories loss diet and enjoy long term weight loss.
Learn how to determine whether what you feel is hunger or just a learned emotional response. The real physical signs of hunger can include a rumbling tummy or perhaps feeling lethargic and weak so if you have experienced emotional responses to eating across many years, you may eat before feeling truly hungry and not recognize these symptoms easily. Allow yourself to get genuinely hungry before eating so that you can become familiar with what this feels like and more accurately pin point when you should eat to provide the fuel your body needs.
Identify what causes your emotional eating by recording when, what and why you feel like eating and take notice of the pattern of your eating behaviors. Do you crave sweet foods when you are feeling down or under pressure and can anything on your calories loss menu satisfy this need? Have you conditioned yourself to a coke and candy as a pick me up at the end of the day or is hot chocolate and a cookie to sooth you before you head off to bed?
Deciding on the events and the times when you are likely to resort to daily emotional eating is the key to controlling your response to the stressors in your life that lead you to out of control eating. Plan what food you will eat or what you will do the next time you feel distressed or under pressure and replace eating with other behaviours that will help relieve your stress. Taking a brisk walk or even an exercise class or eating an apple, some low fat yoghurt or other foods from your calories loss menu, getting a friend to massage your neck or even meditating are all healthier ways to manage the pressures in your life and still lose weight.
Cross comfort food off your shopping list as this may give you momentary comfort when things are tough, but if there is none in the pantry, you can not eat it and will learn to seek comfort in other ways. If you feel down and think escaping in front of the TV with a soda and bag of buttery popcorn is the best way to recover, will you drive to the nearest supermarket to buy this comfort food? Probably not, if you are like most people who search for an alternative food at home rather than go out to buy what they would like to indulge in.
Find other means of comfort instead of food if you feel down, pressured and hyped up, like taking the dog for a walk, going for a bike ride, reading that book you have been dying to start, or meeting with a friend and discuss life over a low fat coffee. There is an endless list of what you can do when you are feeling sad or stressed apart from reaching for the munchies in those places you have always kept them. So start including these alternatives in your life as ‘pick me ups’ and keep on that calories loss diet at the same time.
Stack the shelves that used to store your junk food, with healthy alternatives to use every time you experience one of your cravings and need comfort. In place of those maple syrup pancakes high in calories, keep hummus dip and fresh vegetables, and if you simply must have something sweet, try a fruit salad. It is not a matter of stopping cravings, more a case of satisfying these differently with alternative foods that will in the long term be a way of re-programming your thinking and even your palate as well as accommodating the many foods that you will find on your calories loss diet.
Delay any eating at least 30 minutes from when you are first aware of your craving, keeping a close and accurate check on this time. Do not cheat and start eating earlier than this and if after 30 minutes you still feel hungry, only eat half the portion of the food you planned to eat. You will often discover that after the waiting 30 minutes that your craving will have diminished or even vanished especially if you have found something else to occupy yourself.
Replace your cravings with those activities you enjoy doing and that along with your calories loss eating plan will help to burn fat so you can lose those extra pounds. The additional benefit of exercise is that when you swim, jog, play ice hockey or work out at the gym, your brain releases endorphins and serotonin and this gives you a sense of euphoria that replaces feelings of sadness or frustration. So instead of reaching for the ice cream carton or the cookie jar when you are next under pressure or feeling low, ‘get down and boogie’ doing whatever activity you enjoy most, knowing that your weight loss and your emotional well being will improve as a result.
i always make sure that i am on a Low Calorie diet. i avoid foods with high carbohydrate load because it would just cause more fats on the body. a low calorie diet is also associated with longer life span.
i always make sure that i dont consume too much Calories in my diet. a high calorie diet is bad for the heart so i always avoid high carb and high sugar diet.