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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Are You an Emotional Eater

By Jackie Reid

Most of us just do not realize how much we are ruled by our emotions. And most might not even realize that they are emotional eater. An emotional eater is someone who eats not because he or she is hungry but because the emotion dictates so. If you are feeling stressed, bored, depressed then you reach for something to eat, then that mean that you are not listening to your stomach but rather your emotions.

The Problem

The sad truth about emotional eaters is that they are sabotaging their bodies because most emotional eaters do not eat healthy when they are stressed. You usually go for foods that are high in calories, sugar, fat all of which leads to obesity and overeating.

The problem arises because most people do not even know that they have a problem. And if you don't know that you have a problem then you cannot set a cure in place. The first thing that has to be accessed is you an emotional eater? You will have to watch yourself and the next time that you get some distressing news, or you are angry, sad, depressed, you will have to notice that you head straight to the kitchen.

The Answer

Keeping a journal is a good way to determine if you are an emotional eater. In your journal you want to write what you eat and how you were feeling before and after you eat a particular food. A journal will be good too to tell you what foods you should avoid. You will realize that you might be indulging in foods that just sap the energy out of you, which might spiral you to become an emotional eater because now you have just become depressed for no known reason.

Also you will state in your journal why are you eating, are you eating because you are hungry, mad, sad or otherwise. You will get to find out if work has made you become an emotional eater. This sometimes happen to employees. They get so stressed at work maybe after the regular weekly meeting or you might be dealing with a hard boss. All of these actions will send you off to the vending machine to get something not because you are hungry but simple to calm your stress level down.

If you find that this is a habit that you cannot control you might need to seek the help of a health professional. This is not something to be ashamed of, many people are dealing with this problem and not even aware of it.

But if you are not in the arena that you need professional help then what you might try doing is to have healthy snacks around so that when you feel an attack coming on you can reach for a healthy snack. A great snack can be fresh fruits, dried fruits, trail mixes, nuts or seeds. Keep them near and keep them visual so that you will see them and you will not have to walk far to get them. Chances are if you have to pass the vending machine before you get to your healthy snack, the vending machine will win.

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Jackie Reid is a weight loss advisor who teaches people who want to lose weight how to use diet and exercise to create their ideal body weight through personalized classes and coaching programs.

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