What on earth is emotional eating?
Many people talk about something they call emotional eating. But what is it? Don’t people just eat when they are hungry?
It turns out that the answer is no. People who claim to ahve an emotional eating problem don’t just eat when they are hungry. They eat often when they are sad, upset, angry, scared, stressed out or even bored.
So what can these hapless victims of an overeating problem do about it?
It turns out they there are many solutions. Of course the most common is for people to try and use will power to control their urges to eat.
The failure rate of this approach is close to 100%. Will power alone cannot change such a deeply ingrained behavior.
The second most common approach is to start a new diet. And this actually works for some people. Unfortunately, many people lose weight and then gain it all back plus a few extra pounds. It’s the famous rebound effect. You try to change a behavior then go back to your old patterns.
The third method is to actually use psychological approaches to change deeply held beliefs, thoughts and emotions. These approaches such as cognitive therapy work for many people.
There are also a lot of New Age approaches out there. You can write your beliefs on a piece of paper and burn them and watch your belief vanish into ashes. You can also say prayers and do chants.
However, one approach that actually works is meditation. Meditation has been shown to reduce automatic and addictive behaviors… and this includes eating behaviors. So by sitting on a pillow for 20 minutes a day you can actually reduce your waistline who would have thought?
So if you are looking to get rid of your emotional eating problem or would like to help a friend do the same, tell them to see a good therapist right away instead of wasting money on pills and diet plans that just don’t work.
