Mar
19

How To Overcome Emotional Eating

So you want to know how to overcome emotional eating?

For over 25 years I’ve helped literally thousands of people get rid of most of the problems that plague them, but until last year I had totally failed with overeating. The techniques that had worked with depression, anxiety, anger, etc. were insufficient to help people stop their emotional eating.

But I finally figured out the true cause… and the cure… for emotional eating.

Here’s a clue:

Most of the people who try to lose weight know that they are emotional eating. They know that eating is their “drug of choice” whenever they want to escape negative emotions like loneliness, anxiety, feeling unlovable, and boredom.

What they don’t know is how to substitute something else for eating. Or even better, how to deal with negative feelings without having to go numb by eating.

I want you to think about this: If you eat when you are feeling negative emotions and you are not even hungry, you’ll have a hard time losing weight and keeping it off, am I correct?

Typically, people who are unable to lose weight never learn effective strategies for dealing with their emotions. I understand how this can happen. No one ever told you such strategies existed!

Luckily they do.

Let’s look at one of those strategies that will enable you to keep your emotions from making you eat.

What is this strategy that virtually no one knows about? It can be described in four steps.

  • 1. When you are experiencing a negative emotion that usually drives you to eat, choose to observe that emotion for a few moments. Maybe take a deep breath or two and just focus on the physical sensations.
  • 2. Take a few moments to label the emotion whether it is fear, sadness anger or some other feeling. Then describe how that feeling shows up in your body. If it’s fear, you may be feeling a heavy feeling in your chest or an uncomfortable warmth in your abdomen. Notice and describe it as best you can.
  • 3. This third tip may seem odd at first but bear with me. Notice that there is a part of you observing these feelings that is separate from the feelings. You are the observer of your fear, you are not the fear. You are having fear, you are not the fear. When the fear is gone the observer will still be there observing something else. In fact, this observer part of you is the only part that is constant day after day throughout your life.
  • 4. Notice now that as you observe your feelings, you have a choice about how you’ll respond to them. You don’t have to eat and you don’t have to try to suppress your feelings. You can just observe and notice them without doing anything about them.

    • Unfortunately, you may still keep eating for emotional eating without a few more tips.

    Posted by Chase Murray Eating Disorder Subscribe to RSS feed

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