How to Overcome Your Struggles with Emotional Eating

What’s the struggle like for you?

When some people feel low or depressed, they stop eating altogether. For others, eating takes on another form: stress eating, emotional eating, or binge eating.

It’s a way of checking out. We all have reasons why we want to check out of life sometimes. It can be stress related. Think about pressure at work, speaking in front of people, being a new mom, or experiencing or remembering trauma.

Additionally, it can be related to feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness or anger; especially when any of these feelings exist in tandem with the feeling of not having a voice or control.

Do you sometimes feel like you’re just a zombie, eating what’s in front of you, working, sleeping, barely making it through the day?

Do you feel like there is no end to your struggle with food and emotional well-being?

What was the last situation that induced stress or anxiety for you? Or was it deep sadness or loneliness that struck you?

What other feelings did you have? Did you feel in control or out of control?

Gaining Control

The word “control” can mess with our mind because there are so many stressors and life factors that we simply cannot control.

For emotional eaters, often the power of control was taken from us at a young age. Sometimes it’s suddenly and unexpectedly taken in adulthood.

Our bodies can only handle stress when we learn to dance with life’s stresses.

“Life is found in the dance between your deepest desire and your greatest fear.”

— Tony Robbins

Are you dancing or stumbling through life?

Think back to the first time you stopped dancing. When was it?

In life, there’s not much you can control, but you can control what you do. You DO have a choice in how you want to live and how you envision your life from today on.

What stressors CAN you control? Is there any small change you could make or practice you could put into place to help you feel more in control of your life?

Emotional Eating in This World

The world makes it really hard to keep on track with our health and to be satisfied with our body image.

Processed foods are abundant on store shelves and online, containing chemicals that can harm everything from our hair to our skin and deep inside. Fast food signs lure us in when we’re super tired and stressed.

At the same time psychological pressure from media and society leads us to feel guilty and to strive to become something that was never meant for our body or our soul.

It can be so confusing.

We’ve lost touch with what real health is, what real food is, what real nutrition is – instead we try to follow the mainstream but end up filling ourselves with empty calories and try to fill gaps and keep healthy with pills and powders.

And when we don’t get the results we’ve worked so hard for, we end up eating something sweet to soothe ourselves—something to make us feel better. We forget the meaning of nourishment.

Pressure, stress, and society’s standards make it really hard to focus on the important elements of a healthy lifestyle.

But there is an answer!

It’s possible to stop the emotional override, as long as you have the right tools and mindset!

Ending Emotional Eating

You can regain control of your emotional eating, body and mindset. You can improve your health and transform your life from the inside out.

It’s all about how we see food and view life.

Eating healthy, fresh, natural foods isn’t a punishment for the life you’ve led – it’s an INVESTMENT in your future.

Fresh, nutrient-packed fruits, vegetables, and lean meats aren’t boring and tasteless – you just have to get creative and make the process fun!

Eating lighter, healthier and fresher isn’t depriving yourself of good food – it’s filling your body with the nourishment it needs to do amazing, wonderful, exciting things!

Taking time for you isn’t selfish – it’s vital self-care! Some people, especially women, can’t easily grasp this concept. But it’s time for YOU to understand how to manage and balance your life and put yourself lovingly first!

Ending emotional eating will enable you to:

• get control of your health and gain freedom from unhealthy cycles
• feel energetic, strong and empowered
• become lighter in mind, body, heart and spirit
• discover how your body will feel when it’s not loaded with toxins, inflammation, and extra baggage you don’t need
• remove toxic thoughts from your mind once and for all

Becoming Self-Aware

We cannot make lifestyle changes unless we are aware of what’s working and not working in our lives. We must become aware of our purpose and commit to being present in our lives.

Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it’s about knowing who you are. It’s about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can’t have it.

— Geneen Roth, prominent author in the field of eating disorders

To end emotional eating, you have to start with your mindset. You can transform the way you look and feel by changing the way you think.

Pinpoint your toxic, destructive thoughts and address them.

Become more self-aware and nourish your body and soul with absolute goodness.

It’s time to leave all the frustration and confusion behind, also the diet books and deprivation – throw it all away.

Right now, concern yourself with just today….no matter what you’re currently going through, what happened in the past, or what will happen in the future.

Stop blaming yourself or putting yourself down. I know you really want to be healthy, and you’re probably at your wit’s end with fad diets and all the other “quick fixes” you’ve stumbled upon and the emotional toll it takes on your life.

I know because I’ve been there. I’ve had my own experiences and struggles with emotional eating. I have felt lost and out of control. I’ve experienced that “zombie takeover” when I felt like I had no control over myself, my body, my mind or my life.

I’ve felt empty, exhausted and exasperated and looked to food to feel better. Mostly I just felt numb and I wasn’t really feeling any better or gaining anything besides extra pounds. Then I tried bogus strategies to lose that extra weight. (If you want to know more of my story, you’ll have to read all the way to the bottom of this post.)

For now I want you to take a deep dive into your own soul.

Diving Deep Into Your Soul

Exploring Your Feelings

To end emotional eating you must explore your feelings….really feel them and identify them. When you acknowledge your feelings, you won’t run to the pantry to eat or hide a bag of chips and eat them when nobody’s looking. The deeper you dive into your soul and re-write the story, the easier it will be defining your life and what you want.

Often emotional eating doesn’t come from wanting a doughnut or Doritos or feeling deprived of food, right? We feel emotionally hungry.

Accept those feelings and dig deep to discover why you’re emotionally hungry.

What’s missing in your life? What has been stifled, quieted or shunned? What are your deepest desires? When have you felt stifled, unable to speak? When do you feel emotionally hungry?

Journaling

Journaling offers unlimited possibilities for diving into your soul. You could journal every morning about how you feel and your plan for the day; or journal in the evening about what you’re grateful for and what you accomplished. Make notes about how you can handle stress or other difficult situations going forward. Writing affirmations in your journal can be powerful. Adding artwork can feel personal, therapeutic and enlightening.

This is emotional freedom. You are setting yourself free. Through journaling we can set our hidden secrets free and let our voice free so we can let go of food as the healer.

Ditching Diets

When I use the word ‘diet’, I’m referring to foods you usually eat and how you nourish your body. But for most people the word ‘diet’ is related to losing weight, strictness, deprivation….and often failure, guilt, shame. Not good!

Research has shown that dieting can often lead to binging, emotional eating, and compulsive eating patterns. Trying to find the “perfect diet” can be stressful and frustrating because it just isn’t possible.

Trying to deny and deprive yourself will only lead to a day when you toss up your hands and throw all your hard work out the window and revert back to old eating habits yet again–AND feel bad again.

Only changing the WAY you eat will change your old habits. Practicing moderation is key, along with deep soul work.

Starting a Food-Mood Journal

A Food Mood Journal can be effective for documenting how you feel after eating different foods and how you eat when different moods come on. This can be much more enlightening than tracking calories or checking the scale.

You can become more aware of what foods you crave and when, and you’ll discover patterns regarding your moods and eating habits or food choices.

If you have any digestive issues, what foods or moods do you realize might be triggering symptoms? Some people don’t realize digestive issues can stem from stressors of all sorts–foods, viruses, bacteria overgrowth, anxiety, anger, depression.

Instead of thinking about dieting or even cutting out any “bad” foods, think about which foods energize you and make you feel good about yourself. Make a list of those foods and make sure they are in your regular meal rotation.

Alternative Strategies to Help End Emotional Eating

The Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) called tapping is an effective way to deal with chronic stress.

This technique allows you to literally tap away old stories and distress. EFT tapping helped me settle myself down, tend to my emotions, gain clarity around my needs, stop unhealthy habits, and take more positive actions for myself and my well-being. This tool brought power back to my soul at a time in my life when I was feeling highly stressed and out of control. Many of my clients have also experienced the emotional freedom this tool provides.

Rebuild your self-confidence with affirmations.

Affirmations are short, positive sentences that invoke positive energy and a positive mind shift when spoken aloud. Reciting affirmations, or even writing them repeatedly in a journal, helps rewire your brain into believing the stated concept. If you suffer from self-doubt or combat negative thoughts about yourself and your abilities, creating positive affirmations out of the negative can help rebuild your self-confidence.

A vision board is a fantastic way to dig deep into your soul.

The process of creating a vision board will pull out what’s important to you in your life. What are your dreams? What dreams did you have as a child? What’s on your bucket list? What you love to have in your life? All these questions can be answered by creating a vision board.

Create a schedule for a life you love.

Write about your ideal day. How would your ideal day start and end? What activities would you fill your ideal day with? How much time would you spend doing things related to work, your loved ones, hobbies, and self-care? What else? You’ve GOT to make a schedule for your life if you want to get in control of it. So do that now.

Learn to be in tune with your body and to eat consciously.

This is one surefire way to show some love to yourself. You can master this by slowing down your eating and chewing and committing to not eating when you’re stressed. You can learn to pause when you feel the urge to grab something to eat, and let your body tell you if you’re actually physically hungry or looking to fill an emotional need.

Practice setting and maintaining boundaries.

The idea of “I can’t say NO” is a pattern that we often make for ourselves. It must stop if we want to cherish a stress-free and happier life. YOU are important! Your health must come first, and you don’t need to explain to anyone why you are saying NO. And I’m not just talking about saying no to requests for your help. I’m also referring to saying NO to invitations, engagements and situations that you want to avoid. Don’t let yourself get trapped. Make the right decisions for you. Get in touch with your innermost desires.

Develop a better relationship with food.

Learn how to include foods to support your mental and physical health, support your nervous system, and help you find calm in the chaos.

It’s not about weight loss, but if you’ve been exercising poor eating habits and start turning that around, you may lose weight. If you’ve been doing the opposite and losing too much weight or energy, it will help you get on track to eating well and improving your health.

Partake in massive self-love and self-care practices.

When you feel like over-indulging and you know you’re not really physically hungry, it’s time to kick in some serious self-care practices. Reducing fatigue and stress will help you overcome emotional eating. Call on self-care practices if an emotional hunger starts driving you towards food, or if you resist an urge to binge and want to celebrate (which you should), or if you give in to an emotional eating tug and need a boost to get back on track to loving yourself, or just to treat yourself because….you DESERVE it, no matter what!

Stop the Emotional Override with my FREE Guide

When you become self-aware and take the steps to heal the emotional trauma and build a healthy relationship with food you can learn to control emotional eating. You CAN implement better strategies to manage stress, depression, or anxiety; implement healthy boundaries for others and yourself; and eat consciously and with enjoyment.

I want to help you with my FREE “End Emotional Eating Guide”. Let’s get you glowing and back in control.

I wrote this guide based on my own journey to heal and get back my energy and confidence. The activities in the guide are ones that I found helpful to shift my self-awareness to regain control of my life.

I want that for you, too!

I want to teach you how to listen to your body and soul and really optimize your routine to help your body be the amazing, focused, and energized machine it was always meant to be. But more importantly, I want to help you break the chains of self-inducing harm, because if you don’t learn to love yourself now, ask yourself….can you really accept all the love this world has prepared for you right now?

I know you want to make changes AND you want them to last. That’s why I created this program to give you eye-opening epiphanies and lead you to self-realizations that will help you change your lifestyle for the long run.

You will be guided to dig deep into stress management, emotional eating, and self-care. I know you’re ready to stop the destructive mindsets!

You can achieve everything you’ve ever dreamed of and end self-destruction today.

My guide will get you on the right track to changing your relationship with food, your body, and your life!

When you sign up for your free End Emotional Eating Guide, you will get:

• 14 days of journal prompts with in-depth mindset work and exercises showing you how to end emotional eating once and for all – you’ll be guided through the strategies listed in this blog post and MORE
• 14 days of email support from me (I’m here to help, answer questions, and provide accountability all the way through!)
• 21 suggested self-care practices and support tools proven to help with depression, anxiety, stress relief, stress resiliency, and emotional eating
• your personal Food-Mood Journal to help you learn to listen to your body
• Self-Love Recipe Guide with 40 super scrumptious recipes with nutrition as a core foundation so you can feed your mind, improve digestion and feel satisfied and successful, plus meal planning tips to make life easier for you and 2 sample weekly meal plans (one is meatless)

Embrace your beautiful soul and mind today and UNLEASH the type of life you’ve always wanted!

By following my End Emotional Eating program you can experience:

• more energy
• a stronger immune system
• clearer, brighter, glowing skin
• healthier hair
• more focus
• more comfort in your own skin
• reduced bloating, gas and other symptoms of poor digestion
• reduced toxic load
• buried self-deprecating thoughts
• and most important – the willpower to push through anything that life can throw at you! No more fear! No more doubts! You got this!

It’s not just about listening to your body when it comes to food! Really, the main part of this program is to learn to love yourself, all your beautiful imperfections as well as your charms and gifts, too. And then, make a change because that’s what’s right for you….because it’s another way to love yourself.

Life changes on us every minute. I want to give you the tools to tackle those changes. Life is also not perfect and you need an arsenal of weapons to fight off those days. Those weapons exist. They are here. I have them for you. That’s why I created the End Emotional Eating Guide and Self-Love Recipe Guide.

I created this program to help me redefine the way I live my life; and I reveal more of my own story within the pages of the guide. I now have the tools to tackle life and its crazy changes. It worked for me and for many of my clients. I cannot wait to see the incredible things it can do for you!

This program will help you define the impact that emotional eating has on your life and allow you to REDEFINE yourself and gain control of your days. You will no longer fear possible relapses – you will make a change that will last!

And, you don’t have to do all the experimentation that I had to go through to get that beautiful balance. I’ll teach you how to start listening to your body!

This program will also help you understand how to integrate self-love tactics to psychologically tap into your mind and regain the willpower you’ve desired. It will set you into your routine to really make significant strides in your health and well-being.

I am so excited for you to finally take the steps you need to a successful health journey.

Are you ready to end the struggles and the guesswork? Take the leap with me!

Click here to significantly change your health and enjoy benefits that will last a lifetime!