Just this: emotional eating is a significant factor in weight gain. You need to get connected to your Self to keep a close watch on how certain feelings affect your need to hit the fridge. When you begin to build awareness of how your emotions are making you eat, you can begin to prevent slipups.
Here’s the thing, we ALL eat for emotional reasons from time to time. The definition of emotional eating is simply eating for reasons other than hunger. We use certain foods as rewards, or to make us feel comfort in a desperate moment, or even if we are just bored. If we didn’t eat for emotional reasons, we wouldn’t be human. It is what it is. But when you build awareness, you can make more mindful decisions on whether or not you want to give into those emotions.
So how do you build your awareness? There are a few ways to do it, but for me the easiest and most effective way is to keep a food journal. You can keep it in a word doc or literally write in a journal. You write down what you eat, how much you consumed, what time, and WHY you ate it.
The last part is crucial to your success. It could be “Because I was hungry”, which seems obvious but is more often NOT the reason why we ate what we ate. And what we don’t realize is that if we don’t ask the question WHY, then we won’t know why we are eating. Other, more common than simply being hungry, reasons for eating might be “I was bored”, “My boyfriend dumped me”, “Needed to occupy myself while watching tv”, “was rewarding myself for getting through a rough day”, etc…
You must write it down in order to build awareness. Only then can you begin to see your patterns and make conscious choices about whether to consume food or not.
As your awareness changes, so will your bod.
