Rowena French

Sadly, emotional eating can interrupt your healthy eating and prevent you from losing weight on a consistent basis. Too often our efforts to lose weight come unstuck when we indulge in emotional eating. Using these tips and tricks can help you control your emotional eating, stay on your calories loss diet and enjoy long term weight loss.

Learn how to determine whether what you feel is hunger or just a learned emotional response. The real physical signs of hunger can include a rumbling tummy or perhaps feeling lethargic and weak so if you have experienced emotional responses to eating across many years, you may eat before feeling truly hungry and not recognize these symptoms easily. Allow yourself to get genuinely hungry before eating so that you can become familiar with what this feels like and more accurately pin point when you should eat to provide the fuel your body needs.

Identify what causes your emotional eating by recording when, what and why you feel like eating and take notice of the pattern of your eating behaviors. Do you crave sweet foods when you are feeling down or under pressure and can anything on your calories loss menu satisfy this need? Have you conditioned yourself to a coke and candy as a pick me up at the end of the day or is hot chocolate and a cookie to sooth you before you head off to bed?

Identifying the situations and the times of the day that make you crave certain foods is the key to stopping emotional eating so if you know that you will crave something sweet when you get home to dull the stress of your trip, you can find another way to handle that stress that does not involve food. Maybe you need to listen to music for 15 minutes after you get home, or have a cup of tea with a calories loss snack like low fat cheese on a cracker as you read the newspaper, or maybe a hot shower will help. Find another way to alleviate the stress that makes you want to eat something sweet because dealing with that stress in a healthier way will help you lose weight and manage your stress more effectively.

Cross comfort food off your shopping list as this may give you momentary comfort when things are tough, but if there is none in the pantry, you can not eat it and will learn to seek comfort in other ways. If you feel down and think escaping in front of the TV with a soda and bag of buttery popcorn is the best way to recover, will you drive to the nearest supermarket to buy this comfort food? Probably not, if you are like most people who search for an alternative food at home rather than go out to buy what they would like to indulge in.

Seek comfort in things other than food so that if you feel miserable or pressured you head outside for a walk with your partner or some games in the park with your family or friends. It would be nice if you could just wave a wand and not have anymore unhealthy food cravings but that is not realistic so have a list of alternatives to eating a greasy hamburger and include in these relaxing with a glossy mag that you love, a long hot bath or a pedicure- whatever it is that you really enjoy. Make a list of these alternatives and be ready to act on them instead of eating.

Keep healthy food in the house because if you have healthy snacks in the house you can use those as a substitute for comfort food when a craving hits. Instead of candy bars, keep granola bars in the cupboard and instead of chips, keep popcorn or sliced veggies or other calories loss foods around because making healthy substitutions for the foods you crave is a very practical way to deal with emotional eating. After all, cravings happen but eating healthy snacks in place of the high fat, high calorie comfort food is a practical and responsible way to deal with food cravings when they happen.

Delay any eating at least 30 minutes from when you are first aware of your craving, keeping a close and accurate check on this time. Do not cheat and start eating earlier than this and if after 30 minutes you still feel hungry, only eat half the portion of the food you planned to eat. You will often discover that after the waiting 30 minutes that your craving will have diminished or even vanished especially if you have found something else to occupy yourself.

Replace your cravings with those activities you enjoy doing and that along with your calories loss eating plan will help to burn fat so you can lose those extra pounds. The additional benefit of exercise is that when you swim, jog, play ice hockey or work out at the gym, your brain releases endorphins and serotonin and this gives you a sense of euphoria that replaces feelings of sadness or frustration. So instead of reaching for the ice cream carton or the cookie jar when you are next under pressure or feeling low, 'get down and boogie' doing whatever activity you enjoy most, knowing that your weight loss and your emotional well being will improve as a result.