Weight Loss: Gain Control of Emotional Eating

Break Free from Emotional Eating: Regain Control and Embrace a Healthier Lifestyle

Discover how emotional eating can derail your health goals and get strategies to regain control over your eating habits.

As busy professionals over 40, you might find yourself turning to food for comfort — consciously or unconsciously — when faced with stress from a high-pressure job, juggling family responsibilities, or dealing with various life stressors.

Emotional eating can disrupt your pursuit of a healthier lifestyle and balance.

Emotional eating often leads to consuming excess high-calorie, sweet, and fatty foods.

The good news is that if you're prone to emotional eating, you can train your brain and adopt practices that will help you regain control and align with your health goals.

Understanding the Emotion-Food-Health Cycle "Nightingale Cycle"

Emotional eating involves using food to suppress or soothe negative emotions such as stress, anger, fear, boredom, sadness, and loneliness.

Both significant life events and everyday hassles can trigger these emotions, leading to emotional eating and hindering your health-conscious efforts.

Common triggers include:

High-pressure work environments
Family and relationship conflicts
Fatigue from juggling multiple responsibilities
Financial stress
Health challenges

For many, emotions become intertwined with eating habits, causing you to reach for comfort food reflexively when experiencing stress or negative feelings.

Food can also serve as a distraction.

If you're worried about an upcoming project or stressed about a work conflict, you might focus on eating instead of addressing the underlying issue.

Regardless of what drives your emotional eating, the result is often the same — temporary relief, followed by the return of the emotions and added guilt for veering off your health path.

This creates an unhealthy cycle: emotions trigger overeating, you feel guilty, and the cycle continues.

Strategies to Regain Control

When negative emotions threaten to cause emotional eating, consider these strategies to control cravings and maintain healthier habits:

Maintain a Food Journal:

Track what you eat, how much you eat, when you eat, your emotions, and your hunger levels. Over time, you may identify patterns linking mood and food.

Manage Stress with Havening Techniques®:

If stress is a trigger, adopt stress management techniques like Havening Techniques, yoga, meditation, or deep breathing.

Assess Your Hunger:

Question whether your hunger is physical or emotional. If you ate a few hours ago and don't have a growling stomach, it's likely emotional. Wait for the craving to pass or use affirmations to end cravings.

Seek Support:

Having a robust support network can reduce the likelihood of emotional eating. Connect with family, friends, or join a support group of like-minded professionals.

Address Boredom:

Instead of snacking out of boredom, engage in other activities such as taking a walk, watching a movie, playing with your pet, reading, or calling a friend.

Remove Temptations:

Avoid keeping comfort foods within easy reach at home. Postpone grocery shopping if you're feeling emotional.

Don't Deprive Yourself:

Restricting calories too much or banning favorite treats can increase cravings. Eat satisfying amounts of healthy foods and enjoy occasional treats.

Choose Healthy Snacks:

If you need to snack, opt for healthy choices like fresh fruit, vegetables with dip, nuts, or unbuttered popcorn. Lower calorie versions of favorite foods can also be satisfying.

Learn from Setbacks:

If you have a setback, forgive yourself and start fresh the next day. Reflect on the experience, create a plan to prevent future episodes, and celebrate the positive changes you’re making.

When to Seek Professional Help

If self-help strategies aren't enough, consider therapy or working with a mental health professional or an expert weight loss coach.

Therapy or Expert Coaching can help you understand the root causes of your emotional eating and develop coping skills, potentially revealing if an eating disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder or other root cause of obesity is part of the issue.

Book a Free Call with Expert Weight Loss Oach, physician and naturopath Dr. Christine Sauer today: https://soulful-weightloss.com/free-call

About the Author Dr. Christine Sauer

Dr. Christine is a German-trained physician and naturopath, living in Canada since 1996.
She has struggled with her own weight all her life and gained and lost weight, until in 2005 she ended up at 325 lbs,
Unhappy, unfit and prediabetic, she decided to change. With surgery as her tool, she lost 150 lbs in 2006/7, only to discover that to keep her weight off and become truly confident and happy, she had to change her whole lifestyle.
Applying all she know and learned to herself, she did so.
She has kept most of her weight off since then.
After adding the right supplements, she developed, practiced and used her own brand of meditative movement (IIM-Intentional, Intuitive Movement), a combination of functional fitness, Body-awareness and Tai Chi.
She did intensive work on her own mindset and negative thoughts and became a Licensed Neuroencoding Specialist with Dr. Joseph McClendon PhD, a certified TEAM therapy therapist with Dr. David Burns MD as as well as a Certified Brain Health Professional with Dr. Daniel Amen MD and a Certified Havening Practitioner® (Drs Ronald and Steven Ruden) (Havening is a psychosensory method developed from EFT and EMDR after neuroscience research showed that including Havening Touch made these processes even more effective).
She curated the support she needed, did research on nutrition and nutritional supplements and started to use the right nutritional supplements.
She developed her mindful way of eating "foods you love that love you back" - what she now calls IIE (Intuitive, Intentional Eating) and became an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach and a Life Coach.
This "Body, Mind and Spirit Transformation" also healed her severe chronic mental illness and depression, allowed her to slowly and deliberately withdraw from all pharmaceutical drugs and medications, and the IIM movement art, Tai Chi practice, Chiropractic care and doing the Foundation exercises healed her chronic back pain.
Eventually, she experienced the healing and reconnection of her Body, Mind and Soul that she - like so many of us - desire.
After regaining her own health and rehabilitating her brain health, she now is dedicated to sharing her knowledge and experience with others.
She is a #1 bestselling author, TEDx speaker and loving human being.
In her private life, she experienced the suicide of her first husband, 2 own suicide attempts, and many hospital stays and contacts with our medical system. She is married to her Canadian Husband Mike for over 25 years, and lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, enjoying the East Coast music and the ocean.