Verified by 
As I shared with you last week, I am teaching a course on the Psychology of Eating. Every single student in that class has struggled with emotional eating (EE) and EE has been a frequent topic of discussion. My students want to know two things:
1) Why do I emotionally eat?
2) How do I stop?
The answer to the first one is shocking simple: you emotionally eat because eating has become your go-to coping strategy. As I discussed this in a previous blog post, I won’t dwell too much on the subject here. In a nutshell we tend to emotionally when we are trying to: 1) avoid dealing with a stressful situation, or 2) trying to make ourselves feel better with food. Neither one of these coping strategies is effective as neither one really addresses the problem. But, then again, humans are not always logical. As my friend and author of the book Eating Myself Crazy: How I Made Peace with Food and You Can Too Treena Wynes puts it, "Food used to be my coping mechanism, therefore food kept me hostage for a very long time."
And it does. If you use food as a coping mechanism, as many of us do, you'll soon come to realize that it offers but a temporary solution. The chocolate tastes great, but when you've finished off the candy bar, your problem is still there. This is the point where we must decide whether we are going to take steps to solve the problem or reach for another candy bar. Too many of us chose the latter.
So what should you do?
I think Treena Wynes may have the answer.In Eating Myself Crazy, she describes her 5 step plan to end emotional eating for good:
1) Reprogram your ideas about food - I discuss this one nearly every day in my class. Quite simply, when you eat food products (e.g., processed foods), your body does not recognize them as actual food. Because your body isn't getting the nutrients it needs, it keeps craving more and more food looking for something of substance. This combined with the fact that we learn from an early age to eat for reasons other than hunger (e.g, holidays, birthdays, etc.), just sets us up to ignore our hunger and satiety signals.
2) Stop obsessing about food and your weight – there are 100s of diet theories out there and diet books sell because we keep hoping for the one “miracle cure” that will fix us. But that’s the wrong way to go about it. If we spent less time obsessing about food and our bodies and more time enjoying them, we’ll likely find the weight will come off pretty easily – no “diet” required.
3) Recondition your responses associated with food – this gets to the heart of why we emotionally eat in the first place; it’s a coping mechanism, albeit not a very effective one. So we need to start questioning why we eat what we eat. If your food mantra goes something like this, “When I get stressed out, I reach for chocolate,” then you need to change that to, “When I get stress out, I …. (call a friend, go for a walk, take a few deep breaths). If you don’t replace your coping skill of eating for stress-related reasons with something else, then you’ll be hard pressed to ever stop eating for stress-related reasons.
4) Reframe your thinking – This is one I’ve discussed before. But just a friendly reminder here… Did you know that it takes 5 positive statements to outweigh the effects of 1 negative statement? Think about how many times a day you criticize yourself. That’s a lot of positive self-talk to you need to be doing here. So as I told my students yesterday, every time you say, “I hate my thighs,” you need to immediately follow that with, “I love my thighs, I love my thighs, I love my thighs, I love my thighs, I love my thighs!” Whew! That’s a lot of work. Better just not do the negative self-talk to begin with.
5) Give yourself a break – nobody is perfect. Yes, you always start out with the best intentions when it comes to your diet, and then … you fall off the wagon. So what? (Positive thinking, remember!) Any “diet” should allow for some pleasurable experiences. Restricting your food intake or labeling certain foods as “bad” just makes you want them more. Moderation is key in everything.
Bottom line: If you’re Eating Yourself Crazy, give yourself a break and try out these 5 steps to success. Good luck!t
