5 Easy Steps to Keep Emotional Eating from Ruining Your Weight Loss

If you have a problem with emotional eating, you know how it can ruin your chances at weight loss. Fortunately, emotional eating is a habit that you can break. All you have to do is follow the 5 simple steps listed below, and you’ll be able to lose weight without sabotaging your efforts. Here’s what you need to do.

• Keep a journal. A journal can be a great tool to use against emotional eating. It can help you see what’s causing you to eat when you’re not hungry, when you’re doing this the most, and how you feel after you eat. In your journal, you’re going to want to write down everything that you eat and when you eat it. You will also want to rate your hunger on a scale of 1 to 10 to see if you’re really eating when you’re hungry. Then you should write down exactly how you felt before you ate and how you felt afterwards.
• Indentify your triggers. Once you’ve kept track of your eating for a while in your journal, you should be able to see some kind of patter emerge. Do you eat a lot after a stressful day at work? Do you turn to the fridge when you feel lonely? It’s important to really sit down and decide what is actually making you eat when you’re not hungry. Once you know what these triggers are, it will be much easier to deal with them.
• Find better ways to cope. After you’ve identified the emotional triggers for your eating habits, then you can find other ways to deal with them. Of course, you want to find ways that don’t involve food. For instance, if stress is a large trigger for you, you’ll need to find healthier stress relievers. You could start practicing yoga or learn some deep breathing relaxation techniques. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as it works for you. You’ll need to find healthy ways to cope with any trigger that you have.
• Create a diversion. Sometimes the best way to avoid eating because of emotions is to create a diversion. This means that every time you feel like you want to eat but know you’re not hungry, you should find something to keep yourself busy instead. Get on the phone and call a friend. Go outside and take a short walk. By the time you get done, the craving should be over. If it’s not, find something else to do until it is.
• Get the support you need. It can be hard to break the habit of emotional eating. You may need to get some support to help you. You can ask a friend or family member to help you through this time. Maybe they can check in with you a few times per week or just make sure they’re available to talk when you’re having a rough time. If you don’t want anyone knowing about your problem, you can always find an online support group that you can talk to. This way you get the help, but you stay anonymous.

These easy steps can really help you overcome your emotional eating habits. All you have to do is identify your triggers, find non food related ways to cope with them, and get the support you need. Of course, you usually can’t break a habit like this overnight, so you’ll need to have patience. If you follow these steps, you’ll eventually break this negative habit and be on your way to losing weight in a healthy way.