How To End Emotional Eating

Emotional eating is a big problem for many people. But what is it really? Well, quite simply, you may be eating for reasons other than satisfying physical hunger, providing energy, stoking your metabolism and feeding your muscles, and it may be keeping you overweight.

Are you an emotional eater? Do you eat for the wrong reasons? Do you eat mindlessly, stuffing down food with nary a conscious thought?

Take this quiz and find out:

Do you ever eat for any of these reasons?

1. To obtain a good feeling
2. For comfort
3. Out of sheer boredom
4. Out of habit (for example, every time you watch TV)
5. For social reasons
6. To cope with stressful events
7. To fill a void or missing need
8. To recapture a feeling or memory associated with a food (makes you feel “like being back home with family again,” etc)
9. To cope with depression
10. To cope with (or in response to) other feelings such as anger, loneliness, frustration, disappointment, grief, lack of control or anxiety

If so, then you’re an emotional eater!

As long as you are en emotional eater, you may continue to struggle to follow even the very best laid nutrition plans. That’s what’s so frustrating about this particular problem. You KNOW your nutrition (and exercise) program would work… if only you could stay on it and stop sabotaging yourself with inappropriate eating!

Conventional solutions to emotional eating are helpful. Much of the traditional wisdom focuses on conscious eating (mindfulness or AWARE-ness), as well as setting up your environment for success.

Awareness IS an important part of the solution, but an incomplete one. There are lots of people who are ALREADY AWARE of their emotional eating problems, but they feel unable to stop them

Why? It’s because traditional awareness-only solutions to emotional eating focus only on willpower and the conscious mind. But that’s not where your power lies.

Your true power source is your non-consious mind, which is the part of you responsible for automatic behaviors. Think about it: If the non conscious parts of your mind can handle complex tasks like beating your heart and circulating your blood without consulting your conscious mind, then how easily do you think it can control your eating behaviors?

Your ability to change inappropriate eating behaviors (eating for the wrong reasons), starts with your understanding that you have been running patterns on automatic pilot (unconsciously), without even realizing it.

The first step towards freedom from emotional eating is to develop conscious AWAREness. You can do this in many ways: For example, by keeping a food journal, or by searching your experience and making a list of autopilot behaviors that you didn’t realize were subconsciously-directed habits

But there is more to it than this. Conventional approaches tell you to become AWARE of your “mindless eating” but then they don’t tell you how to change those old patterns.

I’ve been spending the last few months researching this topic of eating behaviors and emotions and I’ve been researching Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) for many years before that. It was NLP that really helped me fill in the missing piece and make what I can honestly and legitimately call a “breakthrough.”

I’ve discovered numerous quick and easy, yet very powerful ways to neurologically short-circuit the old emotional eating behaviors and literally re-wire you with healthy eating behaviors that run on auto pilot just as easily as the old negative habits did. I’ve organized them into a very concise, succint system.

It’s called, The AWARE Program: 5 Steps To End Emotional Eating. It’s not available publicly yet, but it will be in just a few weeks from my new end-emotional-eating.com website, and I’ll post some more tips and excerpts here on the Burn The fat blog in the near future.

In the meantime, the e-book is FREE when you become a member of my fat loss support community. The Burn The fat Inner Circle. You can visit the Inner Circle and find out more at: www.BurnTheFatInnerCircle.com

05 June, 2007 posted in Mind & Motivation