Emotional Eating: 5 Strategies that Help
Many of us are familiar with emotional eating, and in the short term it is not a bad thing. Only when it becomes a habit can it reduce our own quality of life. These strategies help you to deal with emotional food.
A stressful day and you need some nerve food? After a fight with your boyfriend, is frustration good? I think most of us have been in situations like this before. What many of us don’t realize is how much we are guided by our subconscious and mutate into emotional eaters.
This is What’s Behind Emotional Eating
We are hungry and eat because our body needs nutrients and energy. But it does not stop there: Eating out of boredom, during stress, anger or as a reward is part of everyday life for many people – physical hunger is not important here, it is much more about our emotional hunger. According to a report in the news magazine Spiegel Online, about 30 percent of Germans are emotional eaters!
Above all, negative feelings should be compensated with food. Reasons for this can be positive links between food intake and relaxation (candlelight dinner or eating with friends or family) as well as certain foods that are linked to childhood memories, love and warmth. But also learned behaviour in childhood, when food is used to regulate emotions – e.g. chocolate to calm down – can continue into adulthood. And that has nothing to do with eating for pleasure anymore …
Tips for Snacking
Which strategies can help you in the long run is shown below. In acute situations the following tips can help you:
- Identify the trigger: You want to reach for the candy bar or bag of chips – stop and ask yourself why you want to eat that now. Are you really hungry? Or is it stress, sadness, boredom, etc.?
- Think of an alternative: If you are aware of the trigger, you can control against it. Think about how you can best face the situation.
- Start the countermeasure: Are you bored? Do something or work off the pile of letters that is besieging your desk – the sense of achievement will make you happier than the chips. Are you sad? Call a friend* or your parents or write the frustration from your soul.
Stopping Emotional Eating – That can Help
Short-term emotional eating is usually harmless; only when it becomes a habit could it become a problem and, for example, encourage obesity. In addition, eating does not solve the real problems, but instead only displaces them. If you have the feeling that you belong to the emotional eaters, the following measures can help you:
1. Keep a Nutrition Diary
Does emotional eating affect you at all and restrict you in the long run or are there only a few slips? To find out, you can keep a diet diary. In it you list what you eat, at what time and why! So you had a date with friends for dinner, do you feel stressed or did your stomach growl? The diary helps you to discover patterns in your eating behaviour.
2. Understand Feelings
If you are prone to emotional eating, question specifically why you eat. Do you often eat out of boredom, stress at work or relationship problems with your partner? Of course it is not always easy for us to deal with negative emotions and we try to dampen them – e.g. by eating. There is no blanket solution, the possible causes are too different. But often it helps to talk to other people about your feelings, to get things off your chest. Here we give you more tips on how you can better understand your feelings. Don’t be afraid to seek professional help with deep-seated problems.
3. Listen to Your Body
Eat if you’re hungry! So only reach for food when your body (!) demands food. Avoid snacking on the side and excessive eating and stop when you are full. Remember: Of course you should not go hungry, but you can eat again if you feel hungry again. Pay attention to the signals from your body. In between: Distract yourself.
4. Find Alternatives
Eating is a habit, like many other things in our lives. If you eat mainly out of boredom, break this habit by getting another one. It works, you just need some time for it. And so you can change your habits.
5. Stress Management
If your main burden is frustration or stress, we have some tips for you. You can reduce your frustration by doing sports and breathing exercises and – just like coping with stress – conversations with familiar people also help. Certain relaxation techniques are also a good way to manage stress.