Blogs About 'Emotional Eating'

Soothing With Food

Have you been feeling anxious or stressed lately? Has food been an extra source of comfort? Stress eating is a way to distract ourselves from feeling discomfort. It could be dealing with anxiety, stress, boredom, depression, loneliness and other emotions. The urge to eat emotionally is mostly because we don’t want to feel the way we feel. Emotional eating is not really a problem with food or eating. It is a feeling problem. We eat to soothe ourselves. Our core need is not to eat, but to feel...

Mothering Ourselves With Food

In many countries around the world, this Sunday is about celebrating Mother’s Day. The day can bring up a mix of emotions, from joy and gratitude to sadness and grief. I have conflicted feelings about these days – Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, New Year’s Eve. Sometimes I feel like they are “compulsory celebration” days yet they can also be an opportunity for gratitude and acknowledgement. As a mother whose daughter has been abroad for over two years, I can relate...

7 Ways To Self-Soothe Without Food

We all go through challenging moments when we need to soothe ourselves. If you have a history of dieting and food restriction, chances are that you will soothe with food. After a stressful day, you are wired and tired and reach for a bag of chips as a balm for your nervous system. That is perfectly okay and not to be judged. Emotional eating is a coping tool, not a coping failure. If you are looking for alternative coping methods, it’s useful to have a toolkit to comfort yourself when you are feeling...

“I eat my feelings.”

“I eat my feelings.” I hear this so often. I used to struggle with this myself. My clients carry such shame and guilt about eating emotionally, as if they are inadequate in some way. Emotional eating is a way to distract ourselves from unpleasant feelings. It is also a way to numb more difficult emotions. It’s a normal human response, yet diet culture leads us to believe that when we eat emotionally, it’s because we lack willpower and control. That emotional eating is a sign of weakness. Let’s...

Overcoming Emotional Eating

Overcoming emotional eating is one of the most difficult aspects of making peace with food. Few of us are able to totally overcome or end emotional eating and most of us will still use food from time to time as a way to cope – and that is perfectly fine. We simply need to do it from a place of kindness and curiosity. I often say emotional eating does not need to be emotional overeating. We can use food to soothe our negative emotions in a mindful way, you can read more about how to do that here. We...

Community

“A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others.” — Brene Brown — I am overwhelmed by the messages of support and care in response to last week’s blog. My deepest thanks to everyone who reached out. I felt so connected  and...

From The Heart

My anxiety has been sky high. In South Africa we are in the middle of our 3rd wave. There are no available beds in the hospitals. The vaccine roll-out has been slow. There is so much loss and pain. It’s scary. I have been baking cakes and scones. Eating sweets. I want to keep ordering food and keep my pantry full. I don’t want to be deprived of anything I may want in a whim. I am too scared to be out there. I feel guilty that I have the luxury of working from home. Right now, we’re...

The Birthday Blog

I remember the build-up to birthdays. I would start off the year saying by the 4th of June, I am going to be at my goal weight. The calculation would begin. That gives me 6 months. If I lose x much per month by my birthday, I will weigh x. Ugh. My birthday arrives. Some years, I am at the desired number. Some years I’m not. One thing was for sure. My birthday was one big binge. It wasn’t only a birthday – it became a birthMONTH! A free for all. I would eat cake. cheese. sweets....

Two Tools To Help With Emotional Eating

At the best of times many of us struggle with emotional eating. In the last year, with the pandemic throwing us off course, eating challenges have increased. Emotional eating is a way we cope with unpleasant emotions. It’s a way to distract ourselves from difficult feelings. It’s a normal human response, yet diet culture leads us to believe that when we eat emotionally, it’s because we lack willpower and control. That emotional eating is a sign of weakness. One of the symptoms of dieting...

How to Deal with Food and Feelings in Frightening Times

Right now, the world out there feels like a scary movie. Half the world is in varying degrees of lockdown. People are isolating at home. Most people are stressed and anxious. Some are working from home, which comes with its own set of challenges. Others are not working or earning an income, and feeling stress about finances. Many people are experiencing a sense of isolation, boredom or loneliness. How do we cope in times like these? We can throw ourselves into work, spend hours worrying, get busy...

Are You Physically Hungry or Are You Emotionally Hungry?

When I started to change my relationship with food and eating, it was very hard for me to tell the difference between stomach hunger and emotional hunger. Every time I felt anything in my belly I interpreted it as the need to eat. It can be quite tricky to tell the difference at times because the hollow feeling in your stomach from hunger can be similar to the empty feeling of sadness or loneliness. The cramps or constrictions in our belly from anxiety are similar to the contractions of stomach hunger....

52 Ways To Comfort Yourself Without Eating

How often have you found yourself at the bottom of a packet of Doritos or a jar of Nutella at the end of hectic day? Comfort eating is an automatic behaviour for many of us. Studies show that eating when we are feeling emotional releases “feel good” chemicals in the brain. As human beings, we are wired to avoid any form of pain (whether it be physical or emotional) and to seek pleasure. This pleasure can be in the form of many things: shopping, alcohol, drugs, sex, Facebook. For many of us...

10 Steps on How to Eat Emotionally – Mindfully

The general message out there is that we should avoid eating emotionally and that we should find other ways to deal with difficult emotions. Sometimes though, eating emotionally does help and it works at soothing our difficult emotions, even if for a short while... Emotional eating, however, does not need to mean emotional overeating. Thank you Dr Pavel Somov for your very valuable insights on this. If you want to read more about it, I can highly recommend Dr Pavel’s book Mindful Emotional...