It is well known that eating, and more specifically what and when you eat, is directly correlated to your weight. This means that when you are eating healthy foods, and eating when your body needs food you are going to be able to maintain a healthy body weight and lose weight if you have the weight to lose. When you are eating in response to your emotions, you are far more likely to gain weight.
Many of us indulge in comfort eating every once in a while. You’ve probably treated yourself to an ice cream cone after a hard day at work, or snacked on cookies while studying for an exam. For some people, comfort eating goes beyond indulging in the occasional treats and ends up going to an extreme. In this case, this type of dysfunctional eating to appease certain emotions becomes truly unmanageable.
When comfort eating reaches this extreme, it becomes what is known as emotional eating.
How Emotional Eating Affects Your Weight
Unhealthy Foods
The reason that you’re more likely to gain weight is that when you’re eating in response to emotions you’re choosing foods known as comfort foods.
Comfort foods are foods that are typically high in calories, sugar, fat, and carbohydrates and hold little or no nutritional value. These include foods such as ice cream, chocolate, French fries, chips, pizza, and cookies.
Not all comfort foods are unhealthy. However as a general rule, the foods that are reached for to help cope with emotions tend to be less healthy than the foods we eat at meals to help nourish our bodies.
Too Many Calories
Besides the fact that emotional eaters choose unhealthy high calorie junk food, there’s the fact that emotional eating typically takes place alongside regular meals, not in place of them. This means the calorie count can easily skyrocket further contributing to weight gain.
Eating in response to your emotions is more likely to lead you down the road to weight gain, as well as the health problems related to overweight and obesity.
A Vicious Cycle
The vicious cycle that exists in emotional eating causes issues and problems to multiply to further increase your waistline. While emotional eating can give you a quick vacation from reality, it piles more problems on top of issues not yet dealt with, such as the guilt and shame related to eating behind emotions.
As time goes on emotional eating prevents you from learning healthy coping skills for your emotions that further increase your emotional distress, so you can continue to rely on food more and more to suppress your feelings.
Whatever problems or emotions are driving you to eat, the end result is always the same. The undealt with feelings that caused you to eat will still be there, but now there is also the shame, guilt and other feelings associated with the emotional eating. This vicious cycle only propagates weight gain further.
Mindless Eating
Emotional eating can turn to impulsive eating or mindless eating. In mindless eating you’ll reach for food without much thought, as an instant response or habit. Usually won’t even realize what or how much you have eaten and without feeling any joy of consuming it.
This can become so habitual that you may immediately grab a treat during stress or boredom without ever noticing that you did so, leading to more weight gain and sabotage of any weight loss efforts.
Emotional eating is not a healthy way to deal with negative emotions, but there are several methods that are.
Be Aware Of Your Thoughts and Assess Them Logically
Mindfulness gives you knowledge. It supports you to be aware of your thoughts and to be able to assess them logically. It’s achieved by staying focused upon the present and one’s thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations. Awareness means you’re able to feel what’s going on in your body. It means you become aware of your thoughts and have clarity about them.
Sometimes it’s easier to practice mindful fitness if you’re learning a new exercise or trying a new program. Download my free report, Top Mindfulness Exercises to learn 4 mindfulness exercises to not only improve your emotional wellness, but your physical wellness too.
