There are a few basic tips to conquer emotional eating. However, most people think in terms of the rigors of dieting, doing without, suffering, and pain. There certainly is no pleasure in that kind of thinking. It’s important to realize that if you’re only twenty or thirty pounds overweight, most likely you will be able to consume the same quantity of food as you now consume on a daily basis when you are at your goal weight and stay there. How you most likely got where you are is from overeating during holidays which from now on will be accompanied by a red flag in your thinking. Consider that you’ve gained two-five pounds every Christmas holiday and it doesn’t take too many years too accumulate fifteen or twenty pounds. Add in a few other holidays during the year such as Thanksgiving, special occasions such as birthdays, weddings… and fifteen pounds can be acquired in a single year.

However, if you’re a hundred pounds or more overweight, a lot of what you eat is to sustain that level of weight and when you drop your weight your eating habits will be greatly changed.

Most people who are overweight have added weight during holidays when there are many different emotions than they are normally accustomed to dealing with. Most people in general do not drop weight during holidays, they drop the weight between holidays and even if they are on a weight dropping regime, during the holiday they often give themselves more latitude in their eating regime.

In fact, one could say that most great diets are ruined at holiday time and the overweight person goes back to thinking and feeling overweight.

1. The first step to getting a handle on emotional eating is your thinking. Get away from thinking in terms of dieting, giving up, doing without, losing weight, and what you can’t have. Instead think in terms of freeing yourself and shedding weight.
2. Secondly observe how you are feeling as you are having that desert or extra pancake. Notice what emotions you associate with food. At this step we do not expect to do anything about the eating behavior-simply observe. Instead of making your eating about food, notice what feelings you have and make a list of those that you associate with food. Do this for several weeks.
3. Look at each emotion you’ve associated with food and see what you like or dislike about it. Make a list of things you like about the feeling and a list of what you do not like.
4. Notice that when you actually allow yourself to feel an emotion it actually disappears. You have a choice of diluting the emotion whether it be happiness, sadness, boredom, anger… or taking the emotions straight.
5. Make a list of any beliefs that say you shouldn’t feel those emotions you’ve associated with food. Break them down in your thinking and ask if indeed their true. Most likely you will find them hand-me-downs from your family and friends.
6. When you are tempted to have that desert, extra pancake, snack… ask yourself what emotion you are feeling?
7. Affirm to take the emotion straight and stop diluting it with food.

An effective approach to conquer emotional eating involves asking important questions “What is missing here? Why are you not getting the results you’ve been promised?” It is clearly insane to keep dieting when the results are so poor. It’s more important to gain a grasp on how to stop emotional eating–eating emotional stress than it is to read the scale. Besides focusing on the scale doesn’t empower you to be a better more enlightened person, whereas learning how to overcome emotional eating empowers you in all aspects of your life. If you’re a sales person, you’ll be a better sales person. If you’re an assembly line worker, you’ll be a better assembly line worker; a mother, a better mother… Overall, you’ll build self worth and find that what you really want to eat is far more nutritious and less in quantity than you ever before imagined possible.

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[Via Weight Loss]

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