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How to Break Free of Emotional Eating
Eating to Relieve Emotional Discomfort
Eating can be an emotional activity, with deep connections on how our brains and bodies work. Emotional overeaters are:
- Having a feeling of resentment after neglecting one's own needs to appease others.
- Feeling undeserving of their success, with a fear of being shamed.
- Being a perfectionist and being constantly anxious about the possible mistakes.
- Suppressing of all negative emotions.
Overeaters tend to have an 'all-or-nothing' approach oscillating between an all-good diet or an outright unhealthy one, depending on the particular underlying emotion.
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Key Ideas
What causes binge eating
- You do a lot of cardio.
- You have been on a caloric deficit for months.
- Your diet is extremely restrictive.
- You target a low amount of calories on a daily basi...
Go easy on the cardio
Cardio doesn't always necessarily lead to excess hunger or binging.
Some people are more sensitive to large quantities of cardio and are more binge-prone than others. Reducing the amount of cardio lessens the urge to binge or makes it disappear altogether.
Increase your total calories
Binge eaters tend to aggressively cut calories while leaning on willpower to deal with hunger and lack of energy.
But willpower is limited, so this strategy will backfire.
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Key Ideas
Why food
Negative emotions may lead to a feeling of emptiness or an emotional void.
Food is believed to be a way to fill that void and create a false feeling of “
Emotional vs. true hunger
Physical hunger
- It develops slowly over time.
- You desire a variety of food groups.
- You feel the sensation of fullness and take it as a cue to stop eating.
- You have no negative feelings about eating.
Emotional hunger
- It comes about suddenly or abruptly.
- You crave only certain foods.
- You may binge on food and not feel a sensation of fullness.
- You feel guilt or shame about eating.
Emotional hunger isn’t easily quelled
While filling up could work in the moment, eating because of negative emotions often leaves people feeling more upset than before.
This cycle typically doesn’t end until a person addresses emotional needs head-on.
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Key Ideas
Reject the diet mentality
Dieting isn’t sustainable. Quick-fix plans cannot deliver lasting results.
The first principle of intuitive eating is to stop dieting—and to stop believing societ...
Honor your hunger
Eat a sufficient amount of calories and carbohydrates to keep your body “fed” and satiated. Once you learn to recognize these signals in your own body, it becomes much easier to trust your instincts and repair unhealthy relationships with food.
Make peace with food
Give yourself “unconditional permission to eat.”
People realize they don’t really want that food that was forbidden before; they just got caught up in society telling them they couldn’t have it.