, I have found myself eating around the clock. I feel like I can’t stop myself from eating when I'm not hungry and overeating once I start to eat. I have had phases of my life where I found myself turning to food for comfort, but nothing like this. How do I put an end to the cycle — and find healthier ways to cope? —Our relationship with food is complex and emotional. It starts from the moment we take our first sip of breast milk or formula. Food is comfort, cuddles, and memories.
It makes sense that when we are under enormous stress we tend to turn to food for comfort, distraction, and self-soothing. When this happens, we tune out our body’s signals of hunger and satiation and just eat. We stop eating to satisfy a physical need and attempt to use food to meet an emotional one.
Sometimes it feels good in the moment. The food satisfies the need for distraction, comfort, or even excitement. But afterward, we feel bad about whatever we were feeling bad about to begin with and now, we may feel bad about what we ate, too. This tends to create a negative cycle of: Feel bad, eat, feel bad, eat.
So what do you do to break the cycle? Ahead, my tips based on my own personal experience overcoming emotional eating, plus decades of clinical experience treating people with eating issues as a therapist.1. Tune in to your physical hunger. The desire to eat to soothe an emotional needs can be strong, so it's worth going back to the basics ofhunger. It's Think of your hunger on a scale from 0 to 10. 5 is neutral: You are not hungry and you are not full. 4 is a little hungry, you may be having pangs of hunger. 3 is solidly hungry. 2 is ravenous, don’t let yourself get here. 1 is empty. 0 is so starving you might faint. On the flip side, 6 is satisfied. 7 is full, 8 is stuffed.
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