Emotional hunger doesn’t stop when you’re full. Regardless of how full your stomach is, emotional hunger demands more. You keep eating until you are awkwardly stuffed.
Emotional hunger is not located in the stomach. When you are physically hungry, your stomach growls or you feel an emptiness in your belly. With emotional hunger, the hunger is in your head. You simply can’t stop thinking about that treat.
Emotional hunger is accompanied by regret, guilt or shame. If you are satisfying an emotional need with a junky snack, you most likely feel bad about eating after you are done. This makes the feelings that propelled you to emotional eating all the stronger, possibly beginning the cycle again.
How can you cope with emotional eating?
Get support. More people than you think struggle with emotional eating. Finding other people who are dealing with the same issues as you can help you both get to the root of the emotion, and find coping strategies to aid you in overcoming emotional eating itself. Join a support group for people wrestling with the issue.
Exercise. Exercise can help you cope with emotional eating in so many ways. First, when you exercise your body produces “feel-good” hormones that fight depression and anxiety. Second, the time that you take to exercise helps you stay away from both the negative emotion that you are feeling and the boredom that you might be experiencing. Lastly, exercise helps you move past the shame and guilt of emotional eating because you are, in essence, breaking the cycle.
Snack healthy. If you prepare snacks in advance, when your hunger strikes (whether emotional or physical), you will be ready with a healthy snack at hand. For instance, prepare a few carrots and chumus or a handful of nuts and raisins in a Ziploc bag. If you have the healthy snacks at hand, you’ll be more likely to reach for those than the bag of potato chips.
Take away temptation. If you see that you can’t stop emotionally eating, then make it more difficult for you to eat that ice cream and potato chips – don’t buy them! If they are not in your house when sudden emotional hunger hits, you won’t be able to eat them.
Beyond emotional eating, it’s important to get to the root of the emotion that is creating the problem. Anxiety and depression affect millions of Americans every year – and treating those is the first step towards solving emotional eating and living a happier, fuller life.
Register now for an Anxiety workshop by Dr. Paul Foxman on November 17, 2015. Please call Mrs. Schonfeld at 718-382-5437 for more information.