Conquer Emotional Eating and Stop Wrecking Your Life

By Richard Kuhns

To conquer emotional eating is the secret to stop wrecking your life for every time you go to put on your clothes, the uncomfortable reminder of those excess pounds is there like a wrecking ball flying through space and hitting you square in the stomach. But what do you do when that ice cream sundae cries for consumption? And the little voice inside your head asks, "What's one more ice cream cone going to hurt? After all, you haven't had that much to eat today!"

Then there's that other little voice that mumbles, "you're not really serious about losing weight," and leaves a deposit of some guilt for future put downs.

The internal argument is totally about the ice cream cone and nothing about what's going on emotionally. And what's going on emotionally is totally what the ice cream is all about.

What might the emotional factor be? It could be any number of things and it's usually connected with events in one's life that works out the way we desire them to or not.

Yes, when the job gets done to your satisfaction or when you hear good news from home you're likely to feel happy and accomplished and notice an empty spot in your stomach crying for the satisfaction of a treat.

And yes, when your supervisor criticizes you for a job not so well done or you get bad news from home-the third time your son has been in the principle's office-you're likely to feel frustrated and unappreciated and also notice an empty spot in your stomach crying for the satisfaction of a treat.

Whichever happens the same result is realized in that the empty feeling gets all the attention and the feelings of happiness and or frustration gets ignored. Yet, it's dealing with the happiness and or frustration that are key to leaving food and the empty feeling in the stomach out of the mix. Instead food is used to dilute these feelings.

But, what do you do with happiness and the feeling of accomplishment? And what do you do with the feelings of frustration and being unappreciated? You sell them out for food and they are skimmed over like skimming a flat stone on a pond-they eventually sink disappear beneath the surface of the pond and join the hundreds or thousands of others stones already there building a mountain under the surface.

Tony Robbins in his Get the Edge Program suggests that there are up to ten different reasons for each emotion that you feel and he proposes a plan to analyze each of them to get at the bottom of them and how you handle them. However, this may be highly impractical because electrons travel in the brain at the speed of light and by the time you begin to analyze, the flat stone is half way across the pond.

First, it's important to recognize that we are emotional beings and rather than do something with emotions it's more important to ask yourself a simple question, "Can I let it be that something did or didn't work out as anticipated?" If you can let it be, you can let it be and there is no resultant emotion. However, often times before you can think to ask this question, the flat rock is already in hand and the emotion is there.

Instead of throwing that flat stone, the answer is to ask yourself, "Can I let it be that I feel (the emotion)?" Focus on the feeling-good or bad-with the knowledge that when you allow you to feel the feeling, it goes away. Celebrate the joy or happiness or learn from the frustration, for as Tony Robbins also says, "Frustration is a call to action."

Whichever it may be, feel it and the feeling/s disappear, the flat stone returned to the ground and food is forgotten.

When the emphasis is on food, all you get is guilt instead of an opportunity to celebrate joy or be called to action to handle a problem.

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.

Richard Kuhns B.S.Ch.E., NGH certified, a prominent figure in the field of hypnosis with his best selling hypnosis and stress management cds at http://www.DStressDoc.com and http://www.PanicBusters.com . His aim is to make it possible for anyone to manage emotional binge eating. For more information please visit http://www.dstressdoc.com/BingeEatingEbook.htm

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