by JJ Smith
CONCLUSION
Commitment is essential to losing weight and keeping it off, which is a long-term investment in yourself to get better each and every day. Start by setting a goal. In the beginning, you are going to need plenty of willpower to push through the tough times. Multiple goals may put too many unnecessary demands on your mind and body in the beginning stages. Focus on one goal, and use your motivation and willpower to help you accomplish that goal. Accomplishing goals is major and deserves praise. Can you stay motivated and committed to losing weight and living healthy? Or are you simply just interested in losing weight?
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Control Your Emotions
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JUST THE THOUGHT of some foods make us feel comfortable, safe, and warm. Comfort foods take us to a comfortable time or place in our life. For me, my aunt’s sweet potato pie reminds of me of love and family.
Comfort foods are not all bad. Occasionally eating comfort foods can be part of a healthy relationship with food. However, if food becomes the first thing you think about when you are feeling sad, hurt, or lonely, then food has become a destructive coping mechanism. Some overweight people are using food like a drug to numb the pain and often end up in a food coma. They use food to sedate themselves the same way alcoholics use alcohol to avoid experiencing pain or feelings of sadness or loneliness. This can often cause them to be detached from life, friends, and family. It can get so bad that they become depressed and do not even want to go to work. The struggle with emotional eating is one of the primary reasons folks cannot maintain a healthy weight. However, you can end your struggle with emotional eating once and for all.
BEWARE OF EMOTIONAL EATING
Do you eat when you are sad, hurt, or lonely? Emotional eating almost always leads to inappropriate eating. Without realizing it, you may be caught in a vicious cycle of “living to eat,” not “eating to live.” Just the same as a drug or alcohol addict, you have to make sure that you do not use food to escape your problems. See food for what it is: fuel for the body to give it energy and vitality.
An important way to address emotional eating is to learn the difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger. This is absolutely key. Sometimes our relationship with food is an emotional one rather than a physical one. Sometimes we eat to fill an emotional gap or some other negative emotion. But no food—be it a cracker, a piece of cake, a scoop of ice cream, or a slice of pie—can satisfy emotional hunger.
Physical hunger comes about gradually about every three to four hours. Emotional hunger comes on suddenly—I must eat something now. But you rarely feel satisfied or full, and so you just keep eating and eating until the entire bag of chips or pint of ice cream is gone. If the hunger comes on after an argument or a negative emotion, then it is emotional hunger. Rather than deal with the emotions head on, you turn to food. Watch the clock. If you ate a meal and were full one hour ago and then feel a sudden need to eat something, it is probably emotional hunger.
Dealing with your emotional issues will help you improve your relationship with food. To deal with your emotions, you must come to understand that the bad things that have happened in your life have probably been floating around in your mind for years, and because you try to suppress these feelings, as most of us do, they have never been properly processed.
When we dwell on the sad events of our lives, they get etched in our minds, stuck in our bodies, weighing us down emotionally. We must process these experiences and let them go. If we do not, the negative emotions become toxic to our emotional and physical body. Sad or painful experiences need to be processed, they are not meant to linger for years and years.
Just as we can get rid of toxic wastes in the body, we can get rid of toxic emotions. Instead of eating to distract ourselves from bad feelings, we need to process and eliminate them, just like the body does with food: it takes the nutrients it needs and expels the rest.
EMBRACE YOUR FEELINGS
Many of us have not mastered how to feel our feelings. However, when we do not process our emotions, they are often displaced onto the body and stored in the flesh as fat. The only way to remove the weight of unprocessed emotions is to allow ourselves to feel them. Just as food needs to be chewed and digested in the stomach, emotions need to be felt and processed in the mind. For emotional eaters, as soon as the emotion hits, they turn to food to avoid feeling those emotions.
Emotions are there to tell you something. They carry messages. Emotions need to be felt, acknowledged, and processed. Do not be quick to suppress or ignore them—or worse, eat to avoid feeling them. Maybe you grew up in a house where your parent said, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” So you learned to suppress your feelings instead of crying and feeling them. At a very young age, you learned to not really experience your own feelings. If the feelings were traumatic or violent, you learned to numb the pain as a coping mechanism.
We think by suppressing our feelings, they will go away, but they don’t, they just go somewhere else, namely into the form of excess weight on the body. Think of your cravings for unhealthy foods as an emotional outcry or temper tantrum. You can choose to feel the emotion, honor it, and process it so the miraculous transformation can happen in your body and the weight can be released, or you can choose to suppress the feeling and cause it to be stored in your physical body as excess weight. You always have a choice. Spiritual mastery comes from surrendering to your higher self, not trying to handle everything in your mortal mind/body.
Surrendering these feelings will release them from you. Let’s say you went through a painful divorce, your spouse passed away, or you were beaten violently—you will experience grief and pain. But that is not where the story ends. These feelings can be felt and processed in your life. You will emerge stronger and wiser, but only after you have felt the pain. You will learn to love again after a broken heart. Avoiding the pain makes you weaker. Feeling the pain makes you stronger. If you wake up sad, it only means you are a human being with emotions. Regardless of your feelings, there is no reason to run from them or use food to escape from them. Your feelings are always there to teach you something or to help you grow spiritually.
To heal your spiritual self, first feel the emotion and whatever pain is associated with it. Over time, the emotion will no longer have power over you. You will no longer experience suffering from it. It is released and no longer pushed into your flesh, allowing the excess weight to be released as well.
WHY DO PEOPLE STRUGGLE WITH EMOTIONAL EATING?
Oftentimes people think that they are overeating because the food tastes good, but in reality, it goes much deeper than that. And it is not only that you may be dealing with deep-seated emotional issues. Rather than just getting through, life’s stress and hassles can trigger you to overeat and grab unhealthy junk foods to make life easier.
Let’s consider the most common reasons people struggle with emotional eating.
Boredom
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The most common reason people overeat is out of boredom. When you are bored, the experience of eating food breaks the monotony. It typically happens when you are watching nonstimulating television programs, enjoying a lazy Sunday, studying for an exam, killing time, or are just bored at work. If you are the type that always has to stay busy, anytime you have some downtime, you eat because you just have to be doing something. You have to fill any hole in your schedule with eating. Understanding boredom will help put an end to this emotional trigger that causes overeating.
Frustration and Anger
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If you overindulge in eating a lot of crunchy foods, like chips and cookies, it is believed that you are frustrated or angry. The physical act of biting and crunching serves as a way to release feelings of anger and frustration. Some people eat ice or hard candy to release feelings of anger as well. The next time you reach for crunchy foods, stop to think if you are frustrated or angry.
Reward
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Have you ever rewarded yourself with food for finishing a chore, such as studying or cleaning the house? Eating can be a motivation to accomplish some undesirable task. We do this with children all the time—for instance, offer to give them ice cream or cookies as a reward if they behave. Even at the gym, people will reward themselves with a muffin or croissant if they have a good workout. Using food as a reward helps us get through challenging or mundane tasks because it makes them tolerable if we know we have food as our reward.
Lack of Excitement
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When life becomes dull, we often use the eating experience as a way to add excitement. A dinner reservation at a favorite restaurant, for example, is exciting. You just cannot wait to get there. Also, when you first start a diet, you are so full of hope, but when you fall off the diet, you feel down. Then you overindulge in unhealthy foods to try to recreate the excitement and hope again. So we diet and overeat, diet and overeat repeatedly. Some folks have dealt with so much pain and hurt that they eat sweets to counter the bitterness they feel each day. Just trying to bring sweetness into their life.
Food as a Display of Love
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Food can be a reflection of love. Relatives, especially mothers, often show us love through some food that they have prepared for us. For some, even if love was lacking at home, there was always plenty of food to eat. When you are in a new romantic relationship and your partner serves you a home-cooked meal, that typically means the relationship is moving to a higher level. Food has always been used as a signifier of love and caring.
Stress
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Many people eat to cope with stress. Some people experience stressful situations all throughout the day, every day, and this can lead to excessive fat, particularly belly fat. When you are stressed, your body releases cortisol (also known as the stress hormone). Fat caused by stress (i.e., stress fat) stores in the belly. Studies have shown that when cortisol is released into the bloodstream, you become less sensitive to leptin, the hormone that tells your brain you are full. When this happens, you tend to eat more and begin to crave sugar. That means that your body not only slows down your metabolism when you are stressed out, it actually tells you to consume more food.
Mild Depression
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It is very common for folks to turn to food if they are feeling depressed. When people are experiencing mild depression, they also experience weight gain. They interpret their feelings as hunger and they eat to soothe their feelings.
HOW TO HANDLE EMOTIONAL EATING
You will first have to face the feelings that are eating at you day in and day out. Acknowledge what is troubling you and allow these feelings to come to the forefront so you do not have to push them down with food.
Here are some suggestions for how to deal with your feelings:
• Write your feelings in a diary journal.
• Call a trusted friend or relative and talk through your feelings.
• Talk with a psychologist or therapist.
• Confront the person who is the root cause of your toxic feelings.
• Cry it out.
• Find a hobby that you truly enjoy.
• Read a good book or watch a movie.
• Take a nap and rest.
DEALING WITH CHALLENGING OR STRESSFUL SITUATIONS
So what do you do when you are in the middle of a challenging or stressful situation and your best intentions fall through? We have the best intentions, but we get challenged trying to process our emotions and give in to unhealthy eating. One thing I have come to realize is that we can only do our best and make peace with ourselves when we fall off track. I always say, it is about progress, not perfection.
You will need to have practical strategies that help you get through those tough times more easily so you can avoid falling off track.
Celebrations
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Celebrations are a frequent and important part of everyone’s life. It is the time to express love and appreciation to someone during holidays, birthdays, weddings, and many other events. It is the time to bond with family and friends and simply enjoy the fellowship and company of others. So much of advertising and marketing centers around celebrations, particularly around wine, liquor, and beer. It is as if they use celebrations as a reason to market and sell junk food. Even in the grocery store, they use every opportunity to encourage you to indulge yourself when celebrating this holiday or that holiday. Now, of course, if you want to celebrate with others and make it a special occasion, that is perfectly fine, but be sure to focus on the fellowship with others—on enjoying quality time with loved ones. In reality, eating is not the problem. God gave us food for nourishment, satisfaction, and even celebration. The problem is when food becomes too big a part of our total pleasure in life.
If you want to attend the celebration but not indulge in unhealthy foods, do not feel emotionally pressured to eat what you feel is bad for you. You do not have to eat high-sugar, high-fat foods to please other people. I know that can be hard, but there are strategies that will help you avoid the pressure. Even if you are having a great time socializing, you do not have to give in to peer pressure. Feel free to take a walk or call a support buddy or find some excuse to get away from the gathering for a while. Enjoy yourself, let go of your eating restrictions, or resist any foods that cause you to fall off track. You are in control.
TIPS FOR DEALING WITH CHALLENGING OR STRESSFUL SITUATIONS
Here are some common pitfalls and solutions for those who lose control and fall off track.
Have an Escape Plan
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If you feel pressured or uncomfortable at a family gathering, have a plan for leaving or at least for taking a break. Go to another room, run errands to the grocery store, or pick up an elderly relative. Also, it may be best to drive your own car so you come and go when it is convenient for you. If your friends or loved ones are upsetting you, you do not want to be stuck waiting for your ride to leave. Always be prepared to leave when it is best for you.
Start New Traditions
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You can also start a new tradition and bring the one healthy meal to the celebration. But it should not be just a healthy meal but an outstanding meal that shocks everyone when they find out that it is clean and healthy. In my book Green Smoothies for Life, we have dozens of outstanding meals that will impress. You could be the relative known for bringing something special and nontraditional that they will love as it’s also good for the body. As an example, I used to bring gluten-free, sugar-free brownies with walnuts that everyone loved. Folks were so glad to know they could indulge without feeling guilty.
Create Laughter and Love
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Many times when family gets together, they bring up old, painful memories and emotional subjects. I remember one time at Thanksgiving, two relatives got into an argument and one of them flipped over the Thanksgiving table with all the good food on it. It was devastating not to have all that delicious food that took hours to cook.
Sometimes relatives create so much drama that watching it is like theater. Like a movie or Broadway show, it can certainly be entertaining, but do not let it consume you. Sometimes just let it play out, watch, and just stay out of it. Enjoy the craziness in other people as some have been that way for life and are not really going to change. See the humor in the situation. Humor is powerful because it is based upon truth. Truth can make people feel embarrassed, anxious, or hurt but as the saying goes: the truth can set you free. Take the awkwardness away by laughing to yourself. Sure, some family members will not like you making light of some heavy topic because they thrive on conflict and negativity and want everyone to live in that place. You do not have to, you can laugh to yourself and keep it moving.
Manage through Loss and Grief
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Holiday gathering and family celebrations often remind us of loved ones we have lost. When a loss is fresh, it can definitely brin
g up lots of pain and sadness. Even before the gathering, you may begin to feel irritable and sad as you feel the loss of a loved one again. Loss can include a marriage or relationship that has ended. If you spent holidays with your spouse or significant other and the marriage dissolved, holidays can remind you of the love lost or the dream marriage that did not last forever. If you had special holiday traditions, it will be important to create new ones so that the holidays remind you of happier times and happier memories.
