3 steps to break the emotional eating cycle
Your thoughts control your feelings. Your feelings control your actions. If you don’t control your thoughts, you won’t control your actions! And that’s why diets don’t work if you are struggling with emotional eating. You need to change your thoughts, not just your food, if you want lasting weight loss!
When you’re feeling stuck in the emotional eating cycle, it feels like you’re powerless against your thoughts. Rationally we know that food isn’t going to solve our problem, but we can’t seem to make ourselves choose a different way to respond! It feels like these thoughts are just who we are.
The bad and good news is that couldn’t be further than the truth! It’s bad because that means we’ve actually been causing our own problems (sigh). But it’s good - actually fantastic - news because that means it’s 100% within our control to change!
So how do you start?
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You have to slow down long enough to pay attention to your emotions! Emotions are one-word descriptors. People often confuse thoughts and emotions. Without any judgment of yourself, figure out what you are feeling most of the day.
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What thoughts predicate that feeling? It might seem like you don’t have any thoughts, but trust me you do! They might just be so habitual you haven’t noticed. For example, thinking thoughts like “I’m so busy,” “I don’t have time for this,” “I don’t know how I’m going to fit xyz into this day” will make you feel stressed. If you continue to feel stressed all day, it’s likely you will grab food to momentarily feel good and get a break from the feeling of stress. Make sense?
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You have to accept that you are doing this - without judgment - before working to change the behavior. We do this by noticing the behavior and naming it.
For some folks, this is enough! Once you can quickly recognize the pattern, your brain figures out different ways to deal with the situation. For others, we need to do some additional steps to neutralize our thoughts and reframe our situations.
If you need help dealing with emotional eating, I invite you to check out Think. Change. Sustain. It’s my 6-week small group coaching program where I teach you the tools to overcome emotional eating. Not only will I be helping you take control of your emotional eating, but I will also be teaching you habits that can have you losing weight before you even change one thing you are already eating!