How to Stop Stress Eating

Stress eating is a form of emotional eating. What feelings would you be left with if you didn’t use food when stressed?

When we feel stressed, we are feeling an intense set of emotions that could vary from frustration and annoyance to fear and nervousness.

The word stress is really quite an umbrella, non-specific term to say that we are feeling triggered into certain emotions.

When I work with people on emotionally eating due to stress, I always ask them to be specific when they feel stressed.

In any moment, what do you mean when you say you're stressed?

Does feeling stressed mean you're frustrated?

Does it mean you're scared?

Are you angry that someone might let you down?

Or are you worried you might do something perfect and then subsequently feel worthless?

Are you feeling bad from stress because you are over-stretching yourself to people-please?

Stress is a word we all use, but it's very generalized and it doesn't tell us specifics.

Why are we stressed?

The thing we must understand is that being busy and feeling stressed are not necessarily correlated.

As humans it is possible to be busy without feeling emotionally stressed. So why are we emotionally stressed?

When we can get specific though, we can understand that in fact we have a set of emotions that are coming up in a situation we are in.

We are not wanting to feel those feelings and so therefore we are drawn to using food and drinks to suppress them.

So the way you deal with stress eating is the same way you deal with eating from anger or sadness -- recognize the emotions, and feel them instead of eating them.

And if you're stressed because you're treating yourself unlovingly by overextending, why are you doing that?

What emotions and beliefs are driving the habit of working too hard and too long and not living in a balanced way?

There are many things we can learn about how our stress, our avoidance of emotions and our eating are related.

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