Women's Safety Information

Emotional eating occurs when someone regularly eats in response to feelings they are experiencing rather than because of actually feeling hungry. A lot of binge eating is a result of emotional eating meaning that people can consume vast amounts of food in a short period of time.

People tend to find that they eat in response to certain kinds of emotions they are feeling with the common ones being boredom, sadness, anger. It can be a viscous circle when it comes to being overweight. You may eat because you are depressed about your weight but this in turn will make you pile on more pounds, therefore making you even more depressed and prone to emotional eating. The majority of so called mood foods that people consume through emotional eating tend to be high in fat and calories such as ice cream, chocolate and cheeseburgers. Eating food you simply want on impulse but do not really need will not help when maintaining or losing weight.

The key is to recognise these emotional cues and find another activity that will deal with your feelings. Exercise is an excellent way to deal with stress or anger. Finding new things to do in response to your feelings will allow you to break the cycle. It also fills you with that feel-good factor. Invest in a boxing punch bag to release all your anger and aggression. Certain situations or feelings can trigger emotional eating, but one way to recognise and understand those feelings may be to record your thoughts in a food journal. List down the times you desire food, what type of food you are craving and how you are feeling. If you do eat then you need to write down how you felt afterwards.

People who are under stress (in particular woman) find that certain foods will make them feel a little better. Again the answer is to learn to cope with and ease the stress in other ways. Strenuous physical exercise is an excellent way to relieve stress, get fitter and feel good about yourself. When you are feeling particularly stressed out, try a quick thirty minute cardio blast to lift your mood.

All of others will have at some point in our lives engaged in emotional eating and having the odd chocolate bar out of boredom is no big deal. But when your emotional eating becomes more frequent and the amounts of food being consumed get larger, then action needs to be taken. It is crucial that you at first realize that there is a problem, then recognise the feelings and situations that cause you to eat.

Emotional eating can be controlled once you are fully aware of it and realise when you are eating emotionally rather than because of hunger.

By: Chris Waddington

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