Tips to Beat Emotional Eating

Whenever you’re feeling down do you find yourself running to the pantry for some comfort food? Well this is apart of emotional eating and we have all practiced this at some point throughout our life.

Unfortunately, whilst comfort eating seems like it helps at the time; it can sabotage your weight loss efforts. This is usually due to eating too much high calorie, sweet and fatty foods. Once the binge is over you then end up feeling worse as it doesn’t fix your original emotional issue and you feel guilty for overeating. Emotional eating is a vicious cycle a lot of people struggle to break.

Except you no longer have to worry, our team at Thinco have researched how to beat emotional eating and we want to share these 6 tips with you!

Find Alternative Options to Cope with Stress

The first step in breaking this vicious cycle is to find an alternative option to cope with your stress; you need to replace some of that food with something else. This alternative can be anything you enjoy, writing in a journal, reading a book, going to the beach, yoga, meditation or even a quick gym session.

Start a Food Diary

By keeping a log of what you eat in a day, it can assist you in identifying triggers that result in emotional eating and help you realize how much you are actually consuming. The easiest way to do this is through My Fitness Pal, which is available as an app on your phone.

Recognize Addictive Behavior

Next time you catch yourself emotionally eating we want you to try and determine which part of the activity is becoming addictive to you. Is it the addicting behavior of overeating, losing control, preoccupation with the behavior or enduring negative consequences such as feeling ill from over eating? Once you have established which part of this cycle is most addicting to you, you can work towards recovery.

Separate Hunger Cues from Emotional Cues

It can be difficult to know the different between hunger cues and emotional cues however you need to separate the two and practice mindful eating. Start rating your hunger between one and ten; if you feel you aren’t very hungry and are sitting between one and four, then wait till you are at five. Remember not to get overly hungry as you may overeat. 

Look at Portion Sizes

Instead of grabbing a whole bag of chips; measure out a portion into a small bowl. Once you have finished wait 10 minutes before you go back for seconds. Whilst you are waiting practice some anti-stress techniques such as deep breathing.

Create a Schedule

Irregular eating habits usually lead to random eating and overeating therefore we recommend eating regularly scheduled meals and regularly scheduled snacks to prevent overeating. Try setting alarms in your phone or writing down a schedule in your notes.